Stress-tests a brand system at its worst cases before any hero application - 16px favicon, email footer, co-brand lockup, dark mode, single-color print, data-dense screen, legal document, tight social crop - and rules whether the system survives or goes back for redesign. Use when someone asks "test our brand at its worst cases", "does our logo still work as a favicon", "check our identity in dark mode and single color", "will our brand survive an email footer next to a partner logo", or before sign-off on a new or refreshed identity. Do NOT use for QA of a built screen against its design spec - use design-qa-checklist instead; for fixing specific contrast or color-blindness failures, use color-accessibility; for creating the dark-mode palette itself, use color-palette-builder.
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name: surface-stress-test
description: Stress-tests a brand system at its worst cases before any hero application - 16px favicon, email footer, co-brand lockup, dark mode, single-color print, data-dense screen, legal document, tight social crop - and rules whether the system survives or goes back for redesign. Use when someone asks "test our brand at its worst cases", "does our logo still work as a favicon", "check our identity in dark mode and single color", "will our brand survive an email footer next to a partner logo", or before sign-off on a new or refreshed identity. Do NOT use for QA of a built screen against its design spec - use design-qa-checklist instead; for fixing specific contrast or color-blindness failures, use color-accessibility; for creating the dark-mode palette itself, use color-palette-builder.
---
# surface-stress-test
Identities live overwhelmingly on mundane, constrained surfaces, not billboards - and a system designed hero-first accumulates ad-hoc exceptions that read as inconsistency within months. The costly mistake this skill prevents: signing off a rebrand on hero mockups, then discovering at rollout that the favicon is mud and the co-brand lockup needs a fourth logo variant nobody designed. Worst-case-first is the operational meaning of systematize: prove the system where it hurts, and the heroes come free.
## Operating procedure
Run the steps in order. The surfaces are fixed before any rendering so failures cannot be dodged by swapping in friendlier cases; all 8 renders are assembled before any judging so the exception count is complete; the verdict comes before fixes because the redesign rule in Step 4 decides whether fixes are patches or a teardown.
### Step 1: Elicit the system and declare the altitude
Gather exactly these five inputs. If any input is a guess, label it a guess and move on.
1. **System under test**: the identity with all lockup tiers, the palette with its dark values, and the type ramp - from the brand-visual-identity skills.
2. **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. A stress test without locked constants has nothing to hold the system to.
3. **Partner logo**: a real one, for the co-brand case.
4. **Dense product data**: real records for the data-dense case, never lorem - fake data hides the real collisions.
5. **Crop format**: the tightest social crop format in actual use.
State the altitude explicitly: this skill tests the SYSTEM at its worst cases before hero applications exist. Verifying a built screen against its design spec is design-qa-checklist's altitude, not this one.