Commit to One Extreme: Picking an Aesthetic Direction

Ask an agent to make something "look good" and it gives you the average of every interface it's ever seen — a little clean, a little modern, a little playful, fully forgettable. That's not a style. That's the absence of a style, sanded down until nothing protrudes. The model ships the median, and the median is a blend of every aesthetic at once, which is to say it's none of them.

The fix is uncomfortable for a machine optimized for safety: pick one extreme and commit all the way to it. Brutalist. Editorial. Retro-futuristic. Luxury. Maximalist. Not a tasteful gesture toward one — a full commitment, top to bottom, where every type choice, every border, every spacing decision serves the same single idea. Committed work is memorable because it took a position. Blended work is invisible because it refused to.

Key Takeaways

• The median is a blend, and a blend has no point of view. Averaging every aesthetic produces something safe, competent, and instantly forgettable. That's the slop default.
• Committing to one extreme is the differentiator. A site that is fully brutalist or fully editorial reads as designed-on-purpose. Half-measures read as generated.
• Direction comes from product purpose, not vibes. A dev tool, a law firm, and an indie zine want opposite extremes. The product's tone tells you which one.
• A skill forces the commitment. frontend-design makes the agent pick ONE direction and hold it; brutalist-skill and minimalist-skill supply the full vocabulary of a single extreme.
• Skills get you committed; taste picks the direction. The skill guarantees the agent won't blend. Choosing which extreme fits your product is still your judgment.

Why the Blend Is the Enemy

When a model is asked for "good design" with no further constraint, it does the safest possible thing: it interpolates. A bit of the clean SaaS look, a bit of the friendly consumer look, a touch of the serious enterprise look. The result satisfies the literal request — it is competent — while communicating nothing. Nobody screenshots it. Nobody remembers it. It's the visual equivalent of a sentence with no verbs.

The reason this happens is structural. Extremes are, by definition, far from the center of the training distribution, and a model under uncertainty moves toward the center, not away from it. Left alone, it will always soften, always hedge, always blend. So "commit to one extreme" isn't a stylistic preference — it's a direct correction of the model's strongest pull. You have to actively forbid the blend, because the blend is what the model wants to do.

Why Committing Beats Blending

A committed aesthetic creates coherence, and coherence is what readers experience as quality. When every element on a page serves the same idea — the harsh borders of brutalism, the generous whitespace of minimalism, the dense ornament of maximalism — the page feels authored. There's a hand behind it. A blend has no hand; it has a search algorithm splitting the difference.

Commitment also makes decisions easier, which matters when you're moving fast with an agent. If the direction is "brutalist," then every subsequent question answers itself: borders are thick and black, type is monospace and loud, color is raw, nothing is rounded. The constraint generates the design. A blended direction gives the agent no rule to follow, so it falls back to the median on every individual choice — and you get slop one decision at a time. Pick the extreme, and the extreme does the work.

Choosing Your Direction from Product Purpose

You don't pick an aesthetic from vibes — you derive it from what the product is and how it should make someone feel in the first three seconds. A developer tool that needs to signal raw capability wants a different extreme than a wellness app that needs to signal calm. Here's the mapping:

The test for a direction is simple: would committing fully to it strengthen the product's core promise? A focus app screams its promise through emptiness, so minimalism amplifies it. A hacker tool earns trust by looking like it was built by people who don't care about looking nice — so brutalism amplifies it. When the extreme reinforces the promise, you've found your direction.

The Skills That Force Commitment

Three skills make this real, and they work as a layered set. frontend-design from Anthropic is the foundation — it forces the agent to pick one direction and hold it across the whole build instead of regressing to the blend. Install it from the Anthropic repo:

npx skills add anthropics/skills --skill frontend-design

Then, when you've chosen a specific extreme, load the skill that carries its full vocabulary. For a raw, capable, anti-corporate look:

npx skills add https://github.com/Leonxlnx/taste-skill --skill brutalist-skill

For confident, expensive restraint:

npx skills add https://github.com/Leonxlnx/taste-skill --skill minimalist-skill

These specialist skills aren't a coat of paint. They define how every layer behaves under that aesthetic — type, color, spacing, borders, motion — so the agent has a complete rulebook for the extreme, not a vague nudge. With the rulebook loaded, prompt for commitment explicitly:

"Build the landing page fully committed to the brutalist direction.
No softening, no rounded corners, no hedging toward 'clean SaaS.'
Every element should serve the extreme. If a choice is ambiguous,
choose the more brutalist option."

That last line matters. You're telling the agent how to break ties — and "break toward the extreme" is the opposite of its default, which breaks toward the center. The skill plus the explicit tie-breaker is what kills the blend.

Frequently Asked Questions

Isn't committing to an extreme risky? What if people don't like it?

Forgettable is the bigger risk. A committed aesthetic some people dislike still gets remembered, screenshotted, and talked about; a blended one gets nothing because it provoked nothing. You're not trying to be universally inoffensive — you're trying to be the product for your audience. The right extreme is polarizing on purpose, and that polarization is the marketing.

How do I know which extreme is right?

Start from the product's core promise and ask which aesthetic amplifies it (see the mapping table). A focus app wants minimalism because emptiness reinforces calm; a hacker tool wants brutalism because rawness reinforces capability. If an extreme strengthens the promise, it's a candidate. If it fights the promise, it's wrong no matter how cool it looks.

Can I blend two extremes if I do it deliberately?

Deliberate blending by a designer with intent is a real technique — but that's not what the model does. The agent's blend is an averaging, not a composition; it has no intent behind it. Master the single-extreme commitment first. Once your work consistently reads as authored, deliberate cross-references become a tool. Until then, the blend is just slop with extra steps.

Do the brutalist and minimalist skills replace frontend-design?

No — they layer on top of it. frontend-design enforces the meta-rule (commit, don't blend) across any direction; brutalist-skill and minimalist-skill supply the full vocabulary for one specific extreme. Load the foundation, then load the specialist for the direction you chose. Together they give the agent both the discipline and the rulebook.

Where does this fit with fonts and the rest of the stack?

Aesthetic direction sits above the individual layers — it's the decision that makes the other decisions, including type. Once you've committed to an extreme, font choice gets easier (see banning Inter). The direction is the spine; everything else hangs off it. Pair it with the portable systems in the Designs category to make the whole thing reproducible.

Pick your extreme and commit — browse direction skills in the Designs category, or explore the full skill catalog at aiskill.market.