design-principles
owl-listener/designer-skills
Define actionable design principles that resolve team disagreements and guide consistent decisions.
What is design-principles?
This skill helps teams articulate specific, memorable design principles that settle recurring debates and guide decision-making. Use it when the same trade-offs keep getting relitigated across your product or project.
- Craft opinionated, actionable principles with clear stance and memorable phrasing
- Structure each principle with title, statement, rationale, application example, counter-example, and trade-off
- Facilitate team workshops to surface and debate principle candidates
- Prioritize principles by conflict-resolution importance
- Test principles against past decisions to validate effectiveness
- Provide guidance on socializing and maintaining principles over time
How to install design-principles
npx skills add https://github.com/owl-listener/designer-skills --skill design-principlesHow to use design-principles
- 1.Gather inputs: research, team values, and product strategy
- 2.Facilitate a workshop to surface principle candidates from the team
- 3.Draft principles using the structure: title, statement, rationale, application example, counter-example, trade-off
- 4.Debate candidates ('Would anyone disagree?') to refine and validate
- 5.Prioritize principles by ranking their importance for resolving conflicts
- 6.Test principles against past decisions to ensure they hold up
- 7.Socialize widely across the team and reference in design reviews
Use cases
- Resolve recurring design debates by establishing shared decision-making criteria
- Guide a distributed team to make consistent choices without constant escalation
- Document product values and design philosophy for onboarding new team members
- Evaluate design proposals against explicit principles during reviews
- Settle trade-offs between competing goals (e.g., simplicity vs. power, speed vs. accuracy)
- Product designers and design leads
- Product managers setting team direction
- Engineering teams needing shared decision frameworks
- Cross-functional teams with conflicting priorities
design-principles FAQ
Start with 3–7 principles. Too many dilute impact; too few don't cover enough ground. Prioritize ruthlessly.
A principle is actionable if it resolves a real past debate or guides a specific design choice. If it's vague or never used, it's not working.
Review principles annually or when product strategy shifts significantly. Principles should evolve with the product, but shouldn't change so often that they lose credibility.
Reference them explicitly in design reviews, critique, and decision documentation. Make them searchable and accessible where designers work.
Design principles guide long-term, recurring decisions across a product. A design brief frames a single project. Use both together.
Full instructions (SKILL.md)
Source of truth, from owl-listener/designer-skills.
name: design-principles
description: Define actionable principles that resolve trade-offs when the team disagrees. Use when the same decisions keep getting relitigated. For a single project's framing, use design-brief.
Design Principles
You are an expert in crafting design principles that genuinely guide teams through decisions.
What You Do
You help teams articulate principles that are specific, actionable, and memorable.
Qualities of Strong Principles
- Opinionated — takes a clear stance
- Actionable — resolves debates
- Memorable — short enough to recall
- Distinctive — reflects this product's values
- Testable — designs can be evaluated against it
- Prioritized — rank order for conflicts
Principle Structure
For each: title (3-6 words), statement, rationale, application example, counter-example, trade-off.
Process
- Gather inputs (research, values, strategy)
- Workshop to surface candidates
- Draft and debate ('Would anyone disagree?')
- Prioritize for conflicts
- Test against past decisions
- Socialize widely
Best Practices
- Involve the whole team
- Reference in design reviews
- Revisit as product evolves
- Display prominently in team spaces
Related skills
More from owl-listener/designer-skills and the wider catalog.
design-qa-checklist
Build systematic QA checklists to verify implementations match design specifications.
design-rationale
Write design rationale that connects decisions to user needs, business goals, and principles.
design-review-process
Establish design review gates, criteria, and approval workflows to ensure consistent quality.
design-sprint-plan
Plan and run a focused design sprint from challenge to tested prototype in 5 days.
design-system-adoption
Drive design system adoption with strategy, enablement materials, and team engagement tactics.
design-system-governance
Define contribution models, versioning, and change management for multi-team design systems.