Sets up a premium design language before any asset is produced - the three brand-fork decisions (pill or rectangle CTAs, dark utilitarian or warm editorial canvas, playful or precise motion), a frozen fixed-core/flex-variable contract, and the shared-numbers charter every downstream design, motion, and copy skill cites. Use when someone asks "set up a design language for our product", "should our buttons be pills or rectangles", "should our brand go dark mode or warm light", "what should never change across our brand assets", "make our app feel as considered as a top-tier tool", or before commissioning any visual, motion, or copy work. Do NOT use to diagnose why an existing design feels generic - use design-tell-inspector instead; for the full brand book, use brand-guidelines; for creating the palette itself, use color-palette-builder.
---
name: premium-design-foundations
description: Sets up a premium design language before any asset is produced - the three brand-fork decisions (pill or rectangle CTAs, dark utilitarian or warm editorial canvas, playful or precise motion), a frozen fixed-core/flex-variable contract, and the shared-numbers charter every downstream design, motion, and copy skill cites. Use when someone asks "set up a design language for our product", "should our buttons be pills or rectangles", "should our brand go dark mode or warm light", "what should never change across our brand assets", "make our app feel as considered as a top-tier tool", or before commissioning any visual, motion, or copy work. Do NOT use to diagnose why an existing design feels generic - use design-tell-inspector instead; for the full brand book, use brand-guidelines; for creating the palette itself, use color-palette-builder.
---
# premium-design-foundations
Teams commission logos, sites, and launch videos before deciding what kind of brand they are - then every vendor and every generation session re-decides the basics, and the output drifts asset by asset until nothing matches. Drift is the default failure of multi-asset work: text re-described is re-interpreted every time. This skill produces the one-page charter that gets decided once and enforced everywhere. Without a charter, every new asset is a new brand.
## Operating procedure
Run the steps in order: forks before core, core before numbers, numbers before publication. Each step's output is the next step's input - constants cannot be frozen before the forks that generate them are decided, and the charter block cannot be published before the constants exist.
### Step 1: Gather the positioning inputs
Elicit exactly these five inputs before deciding anything. If a number is a guess, label it a guess and move on.
1. **Category** and audience: pro tool used all day, or consumer product used in moments. This one input carries most of the fork weight.
2. **Claim**: the one-sentence product claim the brand must dramatize.
3. **Competitive set**: 3-5 names, as a starting hunch only. The decision-grade convention map is built in competitive-visual-audit, whose floor is 10 or more direct competitors - below 10 the map manufactures false empty quadrants.
4. **Locked assets**: anything already immovable - the mark, the name, any locked color.
5. **Risk appetite** on a template-safe to signature-move axis.
### Step 2: Decide the three forks
… install to load the full skill