A Claude Code skill that carries one frontend house style: warm near-black ground, slate-blue and terracotta accents, monospace instrument labels, hairline borders, macro whitespace, and a terminal showing a transcript that is actually true.
It was extracted from four sites that already ship it:
- nuthatch-indexer.com - canonical, and the source of the palette
- yetanothertaskrunner.com - the atmospheric texture
- redstart-lang.com - the before/after diptych
- engine.camp - the scope panel
All four began from the minimalist-ui protocol in
Leonxlnx/taste-skill and then diverged in the
same direction, which is what made the divergence worth writing down.
Most design skills hand you a method for deriving colour. This one hands you the
colour. The palette in reference/tokens.css is mandated: sixteen tokens, validated in
both themes, and not open for per-project reinterpretation. What varies between sites
is subject, structure, illustration and texture. Not colour.
That is the entire point of a house style. Three of the four exemplars above disagree with each other about colour, which is precisely why the mandate exists now.
The palette is a pair, and both halves have a job: if a shell printed it, it is the slate blue; if a person wrote it, it is the terracotta. Kickers, eyebrows, stat units and list markers are the terracotta half, and a page that skips them comes out reading as blue on warm grey. There is a grep for it in the checklist.
git clone https://github.com/cargopete/cargopete-style.git
cd cargopete-style
./install.shThen start a Claude Code session and ask for the house style, or ask to revamp an existing site into it.
| Path | What it is |
|---|---|
SKILL.md |
The doctrine, the palette, the page grammar, the artefact list, the banned list |
reference/tokens.css |
The mandated palette. Ship it verbatim |
reference/components.md |
Markup and CSS for all seven artefacts |
reference/retrofit.md |
An ordered procedure for bringing an existing site over |
reference/voice.md |
Copy rules, and the banned vocabulary |
tools/contrast.py |
Palette validator. Exits non-zero, drops into CI |
example/index.html |
Reference render: every artefact, one page, no build step |
python3 tools/contrast.pyChecks every ink and accent against all four surfaces in both themes, not merely against the page ground. It caught two AA failures in the shipped sites while this skill was being written, both now corrected here.
--text-faint is listed DECORATIVE rather than failing. That is a contract: it carries
kickers, window titles and timestamps, and never body copy, a link, or the only
instance of a fact.
open example/index.htmlNo build step, no dependencies, and the only colour literals in the file are inside the code samples that are meant to show them.
MIT.