Skip to main content

Search rules

Search all UI Guides rules by name, category, or source

designTailwind

Use Semantic Color Tokens

MUST

MUST: Use semantic tokens (bg-primary, text-destructive) instead of raw colors (bg-blue-500)

Define colors by purpose, not appearance

Bad

Good

Why it matters

Semantic tokens describe purpose, not appearance. bg-destructive means "danger/error background" regardless of the actual color. This separation allows themes to change without touching component code.

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.