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design-review

Structured UI design review — existing code (React/JSX, CSS, Tailwind) and, when behaviour matters, the running app in a real browser — reported as a prioritised Before / After / Why table. Covers visual hierarchy, spacing, typography, colour & contrast, component states, motion, responsiveness, accessibility, multi-page flow & navigation, and interaction continuity — grounded in Refactoring UI and Emil Kowalski's principles. For animation/jank/FPS, focus order, and cross-page UX it can drive Chrome via chrome-devtools-mcp to capture what a screenshot can't. Trigger when the user asks to "review this UI", "design review", "critique this component/screen/page or multi-page flow", asks why something "looks off", "looks AI-generated", or "looks like a wireframe", or wants to raise visual polish. For building UI from scratch use web-taste; for the full animation set see emilkowal-animations.

skills/.curated/design-review/SKILL.md

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# Design Review

Conduct a design review of UI **code** and return a prioritised critique. The reviewer's lens is Emil Kowalski's design-engineering philosophy — *taste is the differentiator; the unseen details compound; show the eye where to look* — made concrete with the heuristics from Refactoring UI, WCAG, and MDN.

This is a **read-only review skill**: it diagnoses and proposes fixes; it does not rewrite the codebase. Each finding names the wrong default the code fell into, the exact fix, and why it matters.

## When to Apply

- The user asks to "review this UI", run a "design review", or "critique" a component, screen, or page.
- The user says the output "looks off", "looks AI-generated", "looks like a wireframe", or "feels generic", and wants to know why.
- A PR touches CSS/JSX/Tailwind and the user wants design feedback before merge.
- The user wants to raise the visual polish or accessibility of an existing interface.

Not for building UI from scratch (use `web-taste`) or for the exhaustive animation rule set (use `emilkowal-animations`).