design-ledger

A non-repetition layer for AI design generators. Wrap any design skill in a persistent fingerprint ledger and a collision gate, and every result becomes provably distinct from every one before it.

design-ledger does not generate designs and contains no aesthetic taste of its own. It wraps a design skill you already use — and adds one hard guarantee: no design produced under it may ever match a design produced under it before.

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Why AI designs all look the same

AI design converges at two different scales.

Scale 1 — it looks like every other AI. Same fonts (Inter, Space Grotesk), same gradients (purple→blue), same glassmorphism, same icon-topped identical card grids, same centered hero. This is the "AI tell," and good design skills already fight it with explicit negative constraints and an "AI Slop Test."

Scale 2 — even when you fix that, it looks like its own last ten outputs. A good anti-slop skill, run repeatedly, still drifts back to the same three good ideas. The reason is structural: in-context memory doesn't persist across sessions or projects. The model cannot avoid repeating what it cannot remember making. A better prompt won't fix that — only memory will.

Tooling is getting good at Scale 1. Scale 2 is wide open. design-ledger is a fix for Scale 2.

This layer addresses self-repetition only. It does not reduce the global "AI look" — that is the base skill's job. A local ledger stops you from repeating yourself, not the industry. (Fighting AI tells at scale would need a shared registry across many users — an interesting direction, not what this is.)

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How it works

Every design logs a seven-axis fingerprint to an append-only ledger file. Before generating anything, the layer reads the ledger, builds a forbidden set, and runs a mechanical collision gate. Nothing gets built until a candidate passes clean.

A fingerprint:

{
  "id": "hollowpoint-ballistic-brutalist",
  "tone": "brutalist-raw",
  "theme": "dark",
  "display_font": "Anton",
  "body_font": "Archivo",
  "hue_family": "oxblood",
  "palette_strategy": "complementary",
  "layout_archetype": "poster",
  "motion_signature": "hover-morph",
  "signature_device": "overflowing ballistic type, bullet-hole motif, hazard stripes"
}

The gate rejects a candidate if any of these is true:

• it reuses any display_font or body_font on record, or
• it reuses any (tone + theme + layout_archetype) triple, or
• it reuses any signature_device, or
• it matches any single prior design on 4 or more of the 7 axes (too close, even if no hard rule tripped).

The seven axes: tone, theme, typography, color, layout, motion, signature device.

The full six-phase protocol (pre-flight → entropy draw → collision test → build → self-check → commit) lives in skills/design-ledger/SKILL.md.

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Proof: same brief, two engines, zero repeats

The Hollowpoint demo brief — a homepage for a fictional industrial tooling distributor — was run ten times across two different base skills, all writing to one shared ledger. Not one of the ten repeated another on fonts, tone, layout, or signature device. Twenty distinct fonts across ten designs; zero collisions.

The split below is the whole point: the same brief produced ten distinct results because the ledger forbade each run from reusing what any earlier run — on either engine — already claimed.

Set A — the ledger wrapped around Anthropic's frontend-design

Spec sheet. Saira Condensed + IBM Plex Sans, amber, broken-grid engineering title-block.	Ballistic brutalist. Anton + Archivo, oxblood, bullet-hole poster.
Trade house. Fraunces + Hanken Grotesk, sepia editorial, Est. 1987 crest.	Inventory console. Oswald + Sora, hi-vis-zinc, live-stock data-rail.
Catalog No. 38. Syne + Spline Sans, cobalt duotone, rotating spec dial + halftone cards.

Set B — the same ledger wrapped around the impeccable frontend-design

Swiss international. Bricolage Grotesque + Spectral, signal-red, baseline-grid overlay.	Warehouse wayfinding. Big Shoulders + Atkinson, safety-yellow, aisle/bay markers.
Material-honest. Hepta Slab + Asap, rust/kraft strata, riveted steel nameplates.	Exploded diagram. Unbounded + Figtree, tetradic, parts that assemble on load.
Refined minimal. Schibsted Grotesk + Newsreader, sage-graphite, magnetic cursor.

All ten fingerprints are in examples/hollowpoint-demo/ledger.example.jsonl. The HTML is in examples/hollowpoint-demo/base-set/ (Set A) and the numbered folders (Set B) — open any file directly.

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Use it

design-ledger is a Claude Code / Claude Agent skill.

1. Copy skills/design-ledger/ into your skills directory (e.g. ~/.claude/skills/).
2. Pick a base design skill that provides the aesthetics (Anthropic's frontend-design, the impeccable plugin, etc.).
3. Ask for a design. The layer reads the ledger, draws a non-colliding direction, builds it with the base skill, then appends the fingerprint.

Choose where the ledger lives:

• Global (default) — one file in your home dir; non-repetition holds across every project.
• Project-local — point at a repo-relative path so the guarantee is scoped to one project.

Point multiple base-skill wrappers at the same ledger file and the guarantee holds across all of them — that is exactly how the ten-design demo above stayed unique across two engines.

Examples

• examples/frontend-design-unique/ — the protocol wrapped around Anthropic's frontend-design.
• examples/frontend-design-impeccable-unique/ — the protocol wrapped around the impeccable frontend-design.
• examples/hollowpoint-demo/ — ten-design proof set with screenshots.

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Attribution & license

design-ledger is licensed under the Apache License 2.0 (see LICENSE).

The ledger protocol is the original contribution here. The aesthetic taste comes from a base skill that this repo does not include or copy — the example wrappers reference base skills by name and invoke them at runtime. The example variants build on Anthropic's frontend-design and the impeccable plugin's frontend-design (Apache 2.0, itself based on Anthropic's). Full attribution is in NOTICE.

Not a new wheel — a wheel that doesn't slip. The memory is the moat, not the model.