Scores any creative artifact - page, campaign asset, deck, video, brand application - against four verifiable quality bars (consumer, startup, premium SaaS, keynote), each a pass/fail checklist with numeric thresholds and per-artifact-type applicability, and returns the bar reached plus the exact failures blocking the next bar. Use when someone asks "what quality bar is this design actually at", "is our site premium-SaaS grade or still at the startup bar", "score this landing page against the top design-led SaaS bar", "how far is this work from keynote grade", or before setting a quality target for any creative project. Do NOT use for a full critique with verdicts and fixes - use creative-direction-review instead; for single-screen UX critique of a mockup, use design-critique.
---
name: creative-quality-ladder
description: Scores any creative artifact - page, campaign asset, deck, video, brand application - against four verifiable quality bars (consumer, startup, premium SaaS, keynote), each a pass/fail checklist with numeric thresholds and per-artifact-type applicability, and returns the bar reached plus the exact failures blocking the next bar. Use when someone asks "what quality bar is this design actually at", "is our site premium-SaaS grade or still at the startup bar", "score this landing page against the top design-led SaaS bar", "how far is this work from keynote grade", or before setting a quality target for any creative project. Do NOT use for a full critique with verdicts and fixes - use creative-direction-review instead; for single-screen UX critique of a mockup, use design-critique.
---
# creative-quality-ladder
"Premium" is a taste word, and taste words start arguments nobody wins: teams either over-invest, spending keynote polish on an internal tool, or ship below their category floor without knowing it. This ladder turns "make it feel like the category's best" into four cumulative bars of pass/fail checks with numeric thresholds. The verdict is a list of failures with owners, and every budget argument becomes a bar argument.
## Operating procedure
Run the bars bottom-up, in order. The bars are cumulative, so the first failure found is always the cheapest one to fix, and a keynote flourish on work that fails the consumer floor is decoration on a defect.
### Step 1: Gather the charter, the artifact, and the target bar
Collect the target before scoring anything - scoring without a target produces trivia, not a verdict.
1. **Charter.** 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.
2. **Artifact.** A URL, a file, or a description detailed enough to check against the lists below.
3. **Type.** Page, still, deck, or film. The type selects which checks apply; inapplicable checks are N/A, reported but never counted.
4. **Target bar** and the business reason for it. A marketing site targets premium SaaS; a launch keynote targets keynote; an internal dashboard legitimately targets consumer. If the target bar is a guess, label it a guess and move on.
5. **Audience.** Design-literate buyers raise the honest floor to startup.
6. **Constraints.** Brand, legal, performance ceiling.
7. **Anchors.** Ask whether a frozen anchor set or art direction brief exists; route drift-across-assets questions to campaign-coherence-review.