/dna

description: Place a design in the measured design space — nearest systems, per-axis percentiles, outliers

/dna

Extract a site's design language and locate it in designlang's measured design space: a 30-feature vector covering colour, type, space, shape and motion.

Unlike `/grade`, which returns an absolute letter, `/dna` is comparative — every number is a rank against a corpus of real design systems.

Usage

designlang dna <url>
designlang dna <url> --corpus ./my-corpus.json

Build your own reference frame — your products, your competitors, whatever you want to be measured against:

designlang dna-corpus acme.com acme.com/pricing competitor.com

What you get

• `*-dna.json` — the vector, the raw measurements behind it, neighbours, percentiles
• `*-dna.md` — a readable report: where it sits per axis, its nearest design

systems, and the features that make it look the way it does

Reading the output

• **Distance** is the mean absolute difference across the features both designs

have — `0.14` means the average feature is 14% of its range apart.

• **Percentiles** are ranks within the corpus, not judgements. A design far from

the middle is unusual, which may be exactly the intent.

• **Coverage** tells you how much of the vector was measurable. A comparison

built from a third of the features is a weaker claim, and the report says so.

Instructions

1. Run `designlang dna <url>` for the URL the user names. 2. Read the emitted `*-dna.md`. 3. Summarise: the nearest systems and what separates them, the axes where the design is an outlier, and — if the user is trying to hit a target look — which axes to move and in which direction. 4. If no corpus exists yet, say so and offer to build one with `dna-corpus`.