Craft floor

Load this after the direction is settled, and build without announcing the checklist. A pinned brief or the committed visual world overrides anything here; your own habit does not. When the design hook is active it already enforces the mechanical checks below as you edit: act on its findings instead of re-auditing each rule.

Verify

Each of these is a check on the built result, not an intention. Run them together in the batched inspection rounds, not as separate screenshot trips; the checks share one render.

• Contrast: body and placeholder text ≥4.5:1, large text ≥3:1. On colored surfaces tint secondary text from that hue or the foreground; never gray.
• Depth: shadows carry an offset and a soft blur. A zero-offset colored halo is decoration.
• Spacing: tight groups, generous separation, more space above a heading than below it. Read the computed values.
• Type: body measure 65–75ch, display max 6rem, tracking floor -0.04em, balanced headings, obvious scale and weight steps. Run the real copy at every breakpoint and fix what overflows.
• Motion: one authored moment, not scattered effects and not one identical entrance on every section. Exponential ease-out from an already-visible default. Reach past transform and opacity: blur, backdrop-filter, clip-path, mask, and shadow belong to the palette when they stay smooth.
• States: hover, disabled, loading, error, empty. Plus real content, working controls, responsive composition, keyboard focus.
• Copy: the product's own language. Controls name their action; errors name the problem and the recovery.
• Coverage: every brief requirement present and findable within seconds.

Refuse

These are the category's defaults, not bans: the brief's own words can earn any of them. Reaching for one when the axis is free means you were not deciding; recognizing that means rewriting the element, not softening it.

Page scaffolds:

• Same-size cards of icon plus heading plus text as the page structure. Cards are the lazy container; nested cards are always wrong.
• The hero-metric template: big number, small label, supporting stats, accent.
• A kicker or eyebrow above a heading. This one is a ban, not a default: no brief earns it back. The heading carries its own weight; delete the label and let the heading speak.
• Section numbers (01 / 02 / 03) unless the sequence itself carries information the reader needs.
• A modal for a task that needs neither interruption nor protected focus.

Surface habits:

• Gradient text. Emphasis comes from weight or size.
• Glass and blur as decoration rather than as a specific effect.
• A colored border-left or border-right above 1px on cards, list items, callouts, or alerts.
• Hard offset shadows (box-shadow: 4px 4px 0) outside a world that is actually neobrutalist. The zero-blur block shadow is a costume, not a depth system; a world that did not choose it never earns it as a default.
• Sparklines, progress rings, and soft-shadowed rounded rectangles standing in for content.
• Monospace as a costume for "technical" rather than for code, data, or measurement.
• A system display face (Impact, Arial Black, the platform sans) as the display voice of an own-world page. Source and self-host a face whose character matches the approved lettering; the closest installed font is a failure, not a fallback.
• Unicode glyphs or emoji standing in for an icon system. Icons are drawn, from a real library or authored SVG, in one consistent stroke and weight.
• Light or dark picked by category. Pick it from the use scene: who, where, under what ambient light.

• Tracking stops at -0.04em. -0.02 to -0.03em usually reads better.

• Declare elevation once, border or shadow. A 1px border under a wide soft shadow is the ghost card. Card radii stay at 12–16px; pills are for small controls.
• Real illustration or none. Sketch-style SVG scenes, loose-sketch / doodle class names, and feTurbulence grain read as amateur. This bans SVG imitating pictures, never SVG doing geometry: crisp vector shapes, diagrams, animated linework, and shader-driven effects remain first-class media. A shaded, perspectived, or figure-bearing illustration is a picture even in line-art style; geometry means shapes a session can specify exactly.
• Backgrounds are surfaces, textured only from the subject's world. repeating-linear-gradient stripes and two-axis grid overlays need an actual canvas, map, blueprint, or measuring tool under them.
• Claims and configuration come from supplied truth; label illustrative values honestly. Naming a concept and then ironizing it is not a claim.

The floor holds the mechanics; it never picks the direction. With every check green, spend the page on the committed world, and when torn between refined and committed, commit.