home / skills / steveclarke / dotfiles / i-normalize
/ai/skills/i-normalize
This skill helps you normalize designs to your design system by aligning typography, colors, spacing, and components across features.
npx playbooks add skill steveclarke/dotfiles --skill i-normalizeReview the files below or copy the command above to add this skill to your agents.
---
name: i-normalize
description: Normalize design to match your design system and ensure consistency
user-invokable: true
args:
- name: feature
description: The page, route, or feature to normalize (optional)
required: false
---
Analyze and redesign the feature to perfectly match our design system standards, aesthetics, and established patterns.
## MANDATORY PREPARATION
Use the i-frontend-design skill — it contains design principles, anti-patterns, and the **Context Gathering Protocol**. Follow the protocol before proceeding — if no design context exists yet, you MUST run teach-impeccable first.
---
## Plan
Before making changes, deeply understand the context:
1. **Discover the design system**: Search for design system documentation, UI guidelines, component libraries, or style guides (grep for "design system", "ui guide", "style guide", etc.). Study it thoroughly until you understand:
- Core design principles and aesthetic direction
- Target audience and personas
- Component patterns and conventions
- Design tokens (colors, typography, spacing)
**CRITICAL**: If something isn't clear, ask. Don't guess at design system principles.
2. **Analyze the current feature**: Assess what works and what doesn't:
- Where does it deviate from design system patterns?
- Which inconsistencies are cosmetic vs. functional?
- What's the root cause—missing tokens, one-off implementations, or conceptual misalignment?
3. **Create a normalization plan**: Define specific changes that will align the feature with the design system:
- Which components can be replaced with design system equivalents?
- Which styles need to use design tokens instead of hard-coded values?
- How can UX patterns match established user flows?
**IMPORTANT**: Great design is effective design. Prioritize UX consistency and usability over visual polish alone. Think through the best possible experience for your use case and personas first.
## Execute
Systematically address all inconsistencies across these dimensions:
- **Typography**: Use design system fonts, sizes, weights, and line heights. Replace hard-coded values with typographic tokens or classes.
- **Color & Theme**: Apply design system color tokens. Remove one-off color choices that break the palette.
- **Spacing & Layout**: Use spacing tokens (margins, padding, gaps). Align with grid systems and layout patterns used elsewhere.
- **Components**: Replace custom implementations with design system components. Ensure props and variants match established patterns.
- **Motion & Interaction**: Match animation timing, easing, and interaction patterns to other features.
- **Responsive Behavior**: Ensure breakpoints and responsive patterns align with design system standards.
- **Accessibility**: Verify contrast ratios, focus states, ARIA labels match design system requirements.
- **Progressive Disclosure**: Match information hierarchy and complexity management to established patterns.
**NEVER**:
- Create new one-off components when design system equivalents exist
- Hard-code values that should use design tokens
- Introduce new patterns that diverge from the design system
- Compromise accessibility for visual consistency
This is not an exhaustive list—apply judgment to identify all areas needing normalization.
## Clean Up
After normalization, ensure code quality:
- **Consolidate reusable components**: If you created new components that should be shared, move them to the design system or shared UI component path.
- **Remove orphaned code**: Delete unused implementations, styles, or files made obsolete by normalization.
- **Verify quality**: Lint, type-check, and test according to repository guidelines. Ensure normalization didn't introduce regressions.
- **Ensure DRYness**: Look for duplication introduced during refactoring and consolidate.
Remember: You are a brilliant frontend designer with impeccable taste, equally strong in UX and UI. Your attention to detail and eye for end-to-end user experience is world class. Execute with precision and thoroughness.This skill normalizes UI features to match your design system, ensuring consistent visuals, spacing, components, and accessibility across projects. It drives a disciplined discovery → plan → execute workflow so changes follow established tokens, components, and interaction patterns. Use it to eliminate one-off styles, enforce tokens, and align UX with system standards.
Before making changes it runs a Context Gathering Protocol (via the i-frontend-design skill) to discover design documentation, tokens, and component patterns. It inspects code and assets to identify deviations (hard-coded colors, custom spacing, bespoke components, missing ARIA, etc.), creates a concrete normalization plan, and then replaces patterns with design-system equivalents while preserving accessibility and responsive behavior. After refactors it consolidates components, removes orphans, and runs linting/tests to prevent regressions.
What if there is no design system documentation available?
Follow the protocol: run teach-impeccable to create initial context before normalizing. Don’t guess—capture principles and tokens first.
Can I create new components during normalization?
Only when a genuine gap exists. New components should be designed to join the shared system and then contributed back; avoid one-off components.