Neo-Industrial Design

SkillMedia

Design or restyle web interfaces in the user's neo-industrial or editorial-brutalist style. Use when that visual direction is requested; not for generic dashboards, dark themes, or copywriting.

Available today. Use it from your connected AI after setup.

Connect ahel once, and every AI you use reads what you have installed.

Then ask your AI: use the Neo-Industrial Design skill

What this skill tells your AI

The instructions your AI receives, as published by elithrar/dotfiles in .agents/skills/neo-industrial-design/SKILL.md and read by ahel’s review.

Apply a coherent visual system to web content. The result should feel engineered, editorial, and physically composed: typography carries the hierarchy, a disciplined grid controls tension, imagery behaves as evidence, and technical graphics clarify structure or state.

The user's instructions and existing product requirements take precedence. Treat supplied copy, facts, information architecture, and imagery as content inputs. Do not research, fact-check, or rewrite substantive content unless the user explicitly asks. When required content is missing, use neutral placeholders or leave the region open rather than inventing subject matter.

Set the visual thesis

Infer these choices from the supplied brief and existing interface; make routine design decisions without a separate approval round:

  1. Mode: editorial, instrumental, or hybrid. Editorial mode is type-led and poster-like. Instrumental mode is image- or interface-led. Hybrid mode alternates them.
  2. Dominant gesture: one primary move, such as an edge-cropped title, a full-bleed image under a grid, a bracketed word, or a giant index.
  3. Grid: columns, outer gutter, and recurring alignment axes. Deliberate violations should remain accountable to those axes.
  4. Signal: one accent color with a consistent visual role such as action, selection, position, or emphasis.

Read references/visual-system.md before designing or restyling the interface. Use it as a system of relationships, not as a checklist of effects.

Build from macro to micro

  1. Establish section proportions, dominant fields, reading order, and the type/image silhouette.
  2. Lock the display, body, and annotation type roles and their scale contrast.
  3. Apply the grid to content edges, rules, images, navigation, and repeated modules.
  4. Introduce only the graphic motifs that reinforce an alignment, boundary, state, measurement, or interaction.
  5. Compose both mobile and desktop around the primary task. In an instrumental interface, keep the map, data, or working surface dominant; oversized titles and decoration must not displace it.

Preserve semantic HTML, source-order clarity, keyboard access, visible focus, alt text, useful contrast, and readable body sizes. Technical styling does not justify inaccessible text or controls.

Make responsiveness compositional

  • Recompose wide grids into fewer columns instead of shrinking the desktop canvas uniformly.
  • Set intentional mobile headline breaks and preserve the primary reading path.
  • Move secondary rails after main content; remove only redundant decoration.
  • Prevent interactive content from clipping or causing horizontal scrolling.
  • Retain deliberate display-type cropping only when the title remains understandable and fully available to assistive technology.

Review the rendered result

For implemented changes, use references/review.md to inspect the affected page at wide desktop and narrow phone widths. Fix failures in hierarchy, alignment, legibility, responsiveness, or interaction within the requested implementation. For review-only requests, report findings without changing or publishing the interface. Do not add motifs to compensate for a weak composition.

Output

Deliver a usable, responsive web interface with one legible visual thesis and a consistent design system. In the handoff, state the chosen mode and the most important visual correction made during rendered review.

Signals

GitHub stars
203
Forks
15
Last commit
Sep 2026
Advanced
Catalog kind
skill
Gateway key
neo-industrial-design
Source
github.com/elithrar/dotfiles