Reviews finished creative work - landing pages, campaign assets, trailers, decks, generated imagery - the way a creative director does: runs the swap, squint, mono, 16px, and strategy-word test battery with a required evidence artifact per test, states why the work does or does not clear its target quality bar, and delivers severity-ranked verdicts with each fix routed to its owning skill. Use when someone asks "give this landing page a creative director review", "does this work feel premium or just competent", "tear apart our launch assets before we ship them", "this feels expensive on one page and cheap on the next - tell me why", or when finished creative work needs a final judgment before shipping. Do NOT use for single-screen UX critique of a pre-build mockup - use design-critique; for scoring alone, use creative-quality-ladder; for brand-rule compliance, use brand-application-review; for campaign-wide drift, use campaign-coherence-review; for the final pre-ship checklist, use pre-ship-creative-gate.
---
name: creative-direction-review
description: Reviews finished creative work - landing pages, campaign assets, trailers, decks, generated imagery - the way a creative director does: runs the swap, squint, mono, 16px, and strategy-word test battery with a required evidence artifact per test, states why the work does or does not clear its target quality bar, and delivers severity-ranked verdicts with each fix routed to its owning skill. Use when someone asks "give this landing page a creative director review", "does this work feel premium or just competent", "tear apart our launch assets before we ship them", "this feels expensive on one page and cheap on the next - tell me why", or when finished creative work needs a final judgment before shipping. Do NOT use for single-screen UX critique of a pre-build mockup - use design-critique; for scoring alone, use creative-quality-ladder; for brand-rule compliance, use brand-application-review; for campaign-wide drift, use campaign-coherence-review; for the final pre-ship checklist, use pre-ship-creative-gate.
---
# creative-direction-review
"Make it feel more premium" is the most expensive sentence in creative production - it triggers rework without direction. A creative director's value is converting a felt judgment into named tests, ranked severities, and routed fixes, so the team reworks the two things that matter instead of re-polishing everything. This skill is that conversion, run against finished work, where the pre-build lens of design-critique no longer applies.
## Operating procedure
Run the stages in this order: evidence (tests) before arbitration (weights) before judgment (verdicts). Each stage constrains the next, which is what keeps the review falsifiable - a verdict that cannot point to a failed test with its evidence artifact is taste, and taste is exactly what the battery replaces.
### Step 1: Elicit the charter, the artifact, and the target
Paste the charter block if one exists. If the client has a charter but the foundations pack is not installed, elicit the needed values directly and label them provisional. If no charter exists at all, halt and route to premium-design-foundations - never substitute worked-example values. The charter core values are forks, accent, canvas and ink, radius, weight set, motion bands. Then gather:
- **Artifact set** - the finished work itself (URL, files, renders). Ask for the real artifact; a description cannot feed the battery.
- **Target bar** - the bar this work is aiming at, from creative-quality-ladder. If it is a guess, label it a guess and move on.
- **Strategy words** - from the brief written with art-direction-brief-writer. If no brief exists, extract 3 strategy words with the requester and label them provisional.
- **Fixed core** - the brief's frozen constants, if a brief exists.
- **Audience** - who the work must convince.
- **Signature move** - what the maker believes is the work's signature move; the review must address it by name.
Battery before opinion: the tests produce the evidence the verdicts then rank.