Reviewing design work

You are judging existing design output — a PR diff, a rendered surface, a screenshot, a Figma handoff, or a spec — not building a system and not consuming one. This is an L1 dispatcher: it orients you, orders the lenses, and points at the skill that carries each lens's rules. Run the lenses in the order below so objective rule violations surface before subjective bar judgments, and cheap code reads run before expensive browser-driving passes. Each station gets a pointer, not a re-teaching — load the station's own skill to actually run it.

When to use

• Reviewing a PR that adds or changes UI code, styles, tokens, or theme.
• Critiquing a rendered surface or screenshot (every theme and mode).
• Reviewing a design spec or a Figma → code handoff before the build lands.
• Running the design-critic gate on a slice (see orchestrating-elite-agent-qa).

When NOT to use

• Building a design system (tokens, scales, palettes, naming) — load designing-a-design-system, not this dispatcher.
• Consuming a design system (wiring an existing token set into a product) — load consuming-a-design-system.
• Pure logic / backend review with no design surface.

Lens order

Run the lenses in this order within a review session. (In clud-bug's pipeline the code and design lenses are independently gated passes — SPEC §2.2 — so this order sequences a reviewer's work and findings, not the passes.)

1. Code + markup lens — web-interface-guidelines-review. The opinionated rule set (WIG, Material 3, Radix) plus token-driven contrast/typography/spacing rules: APCA-preferred contrast cross-checked with WCAG 2.2 AA, atomic typography class, token-not-raw-hex, verb-noun labels, the focus-ring contract, the 24 CSS px interactive floor. Findings cite rules, not vibes. REQUIRED BACKGROUND: web-interface-guidelines-review.

2. Rendered-surface lenses — on screenshots in every theme and mode. Three lenses judge the render itself:

   • design-system-consistency — token / scale / color-discipline drift visible on the render, not just the source line.
   • frontend-a11y — contrast ratios, focus visibility, tap targets, semantics, and motion on the rendered surface, in every mode.
   • visual-polish — alignment, optical centering, spacing rhythm, glyph/pattern quality, state coverage, theme parity ("fine but not elite" counts).

   REQUIRED BACKGROUND: design-system-consistency, frontend-a11y, visual-polish.

3. Opinion lens — designing-elite-ui. The concrete elite / Figma-grade bar (one-axis color, gated contrast, subtraction, on-grid sizes, every mode). It runs after the objective lenses because it is the subjective bar; the objective violations should already be caught. REQUIRED BACKGROUND: designing-elite-ui.
4. House stance last — when the work is that house's. Apply the L2 stance the work belongs to — thrill-design for Thrill's; it leans on the bar where the bar leaves room and never overrides an objective finding. Skip for anyone else's work.

Each lens judges against the L0 primitives it does not re-derive — the color / type / spacing math: oklch-color-space, apca-contrast, wcag-contrast, palette-relationships, chroma-harmonization, type-scale, line-height-grid, token-naming-conventions, component-sizing-principles.

A finding justified by a named principle rather than by what was observed has two more L0 primitives behind it: empirical-design-principles for the falsifiable ones — Gestalt proximity (it carries the ratio a grouping claim must clear, which the polish lens defers to), Fitts, Hick, Miller, von Restorff — and usability-heuristics for Nielsen, Norman and Shneiderman, where the gate is source and edition rather than prediction.

What fires when

System-specific layers

These lenses are generic; an L2 stance composes on top rather than replacing them. thrill-design is one house's (lens 4). udts-review is one system's (incubating): a parity marker pointing at tokenomics, not loadable guidance yet.

Cross-references

• L0 primitives: oklch-color-space, apca-contrast, wcag-contrast, palette-relationships, chroma-harmonization, type-scale, line-height-grid, token-naming-conventions, component-sizing-principles, empirical-design-principles, usability-heuristics, motion-continuity.
• L0 critic lenses: web-interface-guidelines-review, design-system-consistency, frontend-a11y, visual-polish, designing-elite-ui; and orchestrating-elite-agent-qa (rendered-pass gate).
• L1 siblings: designing-a-design-system, consuming-a-design-system.
• L2 stances: udts-review (incubating), thrill-design.