About the catalog — Design Catalog

Design Catalog is a public, read-only reference archive of aesthetic directions for web interfaces. A searchable catalog of aesthetic visual directions for web interfaces, each documented with a live specimen, a copyable agent prompt, and a copyable Markdown specification.

What an entry contains

Every style in the catalog carries four things:

A specimen. An original illustration, rendered in HTML and CSS from the entry's own specification. It is not a photograph and carries no external provenance.
A visible summary. One or two plain sentences describing the direction, written to be readable on its own.
An agent prompt. A self-contained document that gives an agent framing and recommendations for applying the style. It does not assume a particular agent, repository, or prior conversation.
A Markdown specification. The style's rules, the failures that block acceptance, and a verifiable acceptance criterion for each rule.

Why both artifacts exist

The prompt and the specification answer different questions. The prompt explains intent and how to apply a direction; the specification states what must be true for the result to count as that style. Either one can be pasted alone into a fresh conversation and still work. A rule with no verifiable acceptance criterion is decorative prose, so the catalog does not ship one.

How it is maintained

Entries are authored as files and reviewed in version control. There is no content editor and no account system. Corrections are made by changing the source and rebuilding, which keeps the history of every rule and every summary inspectable.

Licensing

Everything the catalog publishes as its subject matter — every entry's agent prompt and specification, the catalog's own summaries and tags, the specimens and the stylesheets that draw them, and the plain-text artifacts served beside each style page — is dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0. Copy a prompt, paste it into a conversation with an agent, change it, publish what you make with it. Nothing is asked in return, and nobody needs to be asked first. That is the point: these artifacts exist to be pasted into a fresh conversation, and an attribution requirement could not be honoured in the one place they are most used.

The code that builds and renders this site is licensed separately, under the MIT License. Neither licence reaches the project's name or the third-party dependencies the site is built on, which keep their own terms. The repository carries LICENSE, LICENSE-CONTENT and a LICENSING.md that records which files fall under which; those files are the authority, and this page is only a summary of them.

Styles in this catalog

Minimalist — Reduces an interface to only what is functionally necessary, using negative space and a restrained palette so content and hierarchy carry the design instead of decoration.
Brutalist — Foregrounds raw, unornamented structure with thick borders, square corners, and stark color blocking, rejecting decorative smoothing to communicate directness.
Editorial — Borrows print-publication conventions — a serif and sans typographic pairing, a structured column grid, and imagery treated as content — to produce a considered, authored reading experience.
Swiss — Organizes an interface on a strict modular grid with a single neutral sans-serif, expressing hierarchy through scale and position alone so the underlying structure stays visible.
Maximalist — Fills the surface deliberately with layered color, pattern, and typographic extremes, treating abundance rather than restraint as the organizing principle.
Glassmorphism — Builds surfaces from translucent, blurred panels that let a colored background show through, using light edges and depth ordering to separate layers.
Neubrutalism — Takes brutalism's raw geometry and makes it playful — thick dark outlines, hard unblurred shadows, and bright saturated blocks set with deliberate, cheerful imbalance.
Bento — Arranges content as a tight mosaic of rounded tiles at varying spans, each holding exactly one idea, so a dense overview stays scannable.
Neumorphism — Extrudes controls from the background itself using paired light and dark shadows, so elements look pressed into or raised out of a single continuous surface.
Flat — Removes every simulation of depth and lets solid color, geometric shape, and clear type carry the interface, using color itself as the primary structural device.
Y2K — Revives the glossy techno-optimism of the turn of the millennium: chrome surfaces, inflated type, specular highlights, and a palette that looks lit from inside.
Technical Blueprint — Presents an interface as an engineering drawing — hairline guides, monospaced micro-labels, coordinate marks, and line diagrams instead of photography.
Handcrafted — Signals that a person made this — variable hand-drawn strokes, material texture, slight rotations, and unpolished imagery set against otherwise disciplined structure.
Dark Mode — Builds the entire interface on a dark ground, expressing elevation through luminance steps rather than shadow and desaturating color so it survives on a low-light surface.
Barely-There UI — Reduces the interface almost to its data: light type weights, boundaries near the threshold of perception, and vast air, with charts doing the visual work.
Retrowave — Renders an imagined 1980s future: a perspective grid running to a sunset gradient, neon glow on dark ground, and chrome display type.
Collage — Assembles cut fragments of photography, illustration, and type at clashing scales and angles, letting the seams between materials stay visible.
Constructivist — Drives composition with a strong diagonal axis, primitive geometric shapes as structure, and a red-black-white palette, producing deliberate visual urgency.
Vaporwave — Recombines discarded consumer-digital material — pastel gradients, obsolete interface chrome, classical statuary, and image artifacts — into a nostalgic, faintly ironic surface.
Art Deco — Composes with strict axial symmetry, stepped and radiating motifs, and restrained metallic accent over deep ground, reading as machine-age luxury.
Anti-Design — Deliberately subverts interface convention — clashing color, uncomfortable type, refused hierarchy — as a stance, while keeping the primary task completable.
Memphis — Scatters flat primitive shapes, squiggles, and confetti pattern in colors that refuse to harmonize, producing cheerful, weightless visual noise.
Ethereal — Holds the interface in high, even light — soft low-saturation gradients, diffuse boundaries, thin large type, and mostly empty space — to read as calm and weightless.