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designVercel

Layered Shadows

SHOULD

SHOULD: Layered shadows (ambient + direct)

Mimic ambient and direct light with at least two layers

Bad

Good

Why it matters

Natural shadows have both ambient (soft, diffuse) and direct (sharper, darker) components. Use two box-shadow declarations: one large and subtle for ambient light, one smaller and darker for direct light. This creates depth and realism.

References

Built by Gleb Stroganov, design engineer at Evil Martians.

The rules come from other people's skills and guidelines — Vercel, Rauno Freiberg, @Ibelick, impeccable, Emil Kowalski, Tailwind, RAMS — each one credited on the Sources page. The work here is extraction and wiring: every rule is pulled into one corpus, given a good and a bad example you can operate, a MUST/SHOULD/NEVER rule an agent can paste, and a link back to where it came from.