/video-design

name: video-design
description: Visual design for videos - colour by act, type scale, chart and layout rules for 16:9 and 9:16 scenes, a design.md handoff that any design skill can fill, and a contact-sheet critique of the render. Use when designing or refining how a video looks (title cards, data scenes, slides, a whole video's palette), when a scene looks generic or busy, when choosing colours for a video, or when /design or /scene-review asks for visual work. Works on its own with a brand, or takes direction from a design source such as taste-skill, Anthropic's frontend-design, or the user's own design skill.

Video design

A web design skill knows pages: scrolling, hover states, a nav bar. A video has none of that. It has scenes the viewer can't pause on, a narration that sets the pace, a phone in someone's hand or a projector at the back of a room. This skill is the toolkit's video layer: it takes a design direction from wherever it comes from and turns it into scenes, then checks the render the way a juror would.

Three layers

design source (optional, the user's choice)  →  design.md (the handoff)  →  video-design (this skill)  →  qc.py + critique
taste-skill, frontend-design, a team's own        palette, type, acts,        fields per act, one data        layout, contrast,
design skill, a brand guide                       rules on/off                accent, type steps, motion      stills, contact sheet

• **The design source** gives the direction: a palette, a typeface, an idea. Any skill that can do that

works, and none is required: with ours (the default), this skill writes `design.md` itself from an act palette and the brand. Plug in your own design skill, or use ours. The project records its choice in `project.json` (`design.source`). See `sources.md`.

• **`design.md`** lives in the project. It is the contract: what the source decided, mapped onto the

video's acts, plus any house rule turned off and why. A different source means a different `design.md`, not different code. See `handoff.md`.

• **This skill** applies it with the rules below, which hold whatever the source says, because they

come from how video is watched rather than from taste.

Rules for video

**Colour follows the story.**

• Two or three fields at most, and a field changes only when the narrative does (a new act, not a new

scene). A colour that changes every scene means nothing; one that changes at the turn tells the viewer something turned. Write the acts down first (`handoff.md`), then give each act its field.

• Neighbouring fields differ in **lightness**, not only hue: light, mid, dark. Two fields of the same

lightness (orange and sky blue) flicker at the cut, and even ffmpeg's cut detector can't see the change.

• Fields meet with a hard cut. Content can fade out and in; the ground does not cross-fade.
• **One data accent.** The brand colour goes on the thing the narration is talking about (the bar it

names, the line, the number) and nowhere else. Everything else is ink or one neutral step. Never a tint of the ground (45% black over lime renders as olive, a colour nobody chose).

• Text on a coloured field is the field's ink at full strength, or at 70-80% for secondary lines if it

still passes contrast. Grey text on colour reads as dirt.

**Type.**

• Five sizes per video, decided once. At 1080p: display 200-260, figure 112-132, title 64-72,

label 32-36, note 28. The phone floor is 28px at 1080p (`qc.py --layout` checks 2.6% of the short side).

• One family, two weights at most. Tracking -0.03 to -0.05em on display sizes, leading 0.9-1.0.
• A title or statement is two lines at most, broken by hand at the phrase (`<br />`), never left to

wrap. Count it: ~32 characters a line at display size on 1920px. An orphan word on a third line is the most visible tell there is.

• Numbers in tabular figures, so a counting number doesn't jitter.

**Layout.**

• One left edge for every title in the video (the same x in every scene); charts and figures may run

wider, but headings never move.

• One dominant thing per scene: the chart, the figure, or the statement. A big number and a chart can

share a scene only when the number is what the chart adds up to.

• No row of identical tiles (four black boxes for four steps). Use one shape with stops on it, a

sentence, or a sequence that reveals on the narration.

• No gradients, glows, drop shadows on things at rest, glass panels or decorative shapes. A flat field,

the product itself, a real picture, or a ground drawn from the subject (below).

• Footnotes and sources: one line, at the note size, at the bottom left. A scene that needs three

lines of notes needs a sentence of narration instead.

**A ground from the subject.** A flat field is the default and often right. When it reads dull, don't decorate it: draw the subject's own structure on it. Ask what shape the thing already has: a calendar has a week grid, a song a beat grid or staff, code a line-number gutter, a map its contours, a chat its message column, a spreadsheet its cells. That shape, and nothing invented, becomes the ground.

• Hairlines in the field's ink at 10-16% (a little less on dark fields). It should read on a phone and

disappear behind the type; if a viewer notices the lines before the words, halve them.

• One motif for the whole video, the same on every type scene. Scenes with the product or a chart get no

ground: they are already the picture.

• Things on the ground use the subject's own vocabulary (a calendar's event cards, a chat's bubbles), as

outlines in the ink, and land on the words that name them (`cue()`). They sit above and below the type, never under its lines.

• It can carry a turn: fill it while the narration lists, empty it on the question. That's the difference

between texture and an idea.

• Record it in `design.md` under "Ground". Never noise, stock imagery, blobs or a generated background; those

are the decoration this re