---
name: all-out-ux
description: "Maximum-creativity design pass: take a screen, page, or app to the far edge of distinctive — committed art direction, one signature element, an adversarial judge loop — when distinctiveness is the brief, not a nice-to-have. Use when the user says 'go all out', 'push the design to its limits', 'blow me away', 'make something nobody has seen', 'design it like an award-winning studio', or asks for the most creative interface you can produce. Do NOT use for an app-wide polish sweep that keeps the product recognizably itself, a standard screen build or routine cleanup of generated UI where professional is enough, usability or WCAG audits of an existing flow, developer-facing surfaces (APIs, CLIs, docs), retention or re-engagement strategy on its own, or runtime performance work."
license: MIT
---

# All-Out UX

The brief is escape velocity. Your default design choices are **distributional convergence** — the statistical center of everything you trained on, which makes them the most-seen design on earth. This pass treats "would most models produce this from the same brief?" as a kill criterion, not a style note. Run the whole pass autonomously; state assumptions inline; never present a mode menu.

## Invariants

- **Default death test.** A choice you would make on most briefs is a default, whatever it is. Steering away from defaults mints new ones — **second-order convergence**: the banned purple gradient of one year becomes the cream-and-terracotta cliché of the next; the anti-Inter font becomes the new Inter. Kill by the test, not by a list — any named cliché list is dated the day it's written.
- **Direction before code.** Commit to a named art direction justified by purpose and audience before writing any markup. If the direction could caption any brief, it isn't one.
- **One signature, spent boldness.** Name the single element this piece will be remembered by and concentrate the boldness there — boldness spread evenly is beige. One orchestrated entrance beats scattered micro-interactions; over-animation is itself a generic tell.
- **The judge is not the maker.** Self-critique flatters its own work. Score output in a separate fresh-context evaluation, and write the rubric like a prompt — its wording leaks into the visuals it selects for.
- **Wild, not broken.** Aesthetics get no ceiling; affordances keep their floor: readable contrast, visible focus, a working keyboard path, an honest `prefers-reduced-motion` fallback. Weird is the goal; broken is slop with confidence.

## The pass

1. **Diverge.** Draft three art directions that could not have come from the same designer. For each: a name, the audience rationale, 4–6 named hex colors, a type pairing, the signature-element candidate, and the one aesthetic risk it takes. Run the default death test on all three; redraft any casualty.
2. **Commit.** Pick the direction whose risk the brief best justifies — not the safest one. Write the tokens down; they are now law.
3. **Build past comfortable.** Typography carries the furthest: no stock fonts, extreme weight contrast (100/200 against 800/900, not 400 against 600), size jumps of 3x or more. Dominant color with sharp accents, never an evenly-spread palette. Compose asymmetrically; break the grid where the signature lives. Push each dimension one notch past where it feels safe — your sense of "safe" is calibrated to the center you're escaping.
4. **Judge adversarially.** Evaluate with fresh context — a subagent where available, otherwise a separate pass that re-reads only the rendered result and judges pixels, not intentions. Originality weighs heaviest; anything the default death test catches is an automatic fail; the usability floor is pass/fail. Revise and re-judge. Hard cap: five rounds or a clean verdict, whichever comes first.
5. **Verify live.** Real browser, motion at full speed, then the reduced-motion and keyboard paths. A screenshot proves layout, not motion. Hand off with the committed direction and signature element named, plus anything deliberately left wild.

If this pass runs more than once in the same product or session, ban the previous run's direction, palette family, and typefaces from the new candidate set — repeated runs converge on this skill's own favorites too.

Load [`references/creative-ceiling.md`](./references/creative-ceiling.md) for the direction library, the judge rubric template, and the dimension-by-dimension extremity guide.