Why Build a Design Critic?
Our designers are good. But even good designers develop blind spots after hours of staring at the same file. We wanted a fresh pair of eyes that never gets tired, never normalizes inconsistencies, and never feels awkward pointing out that a heading is 2px off-grid.
How We Built It
We started with Claude's vision capabilities. We fed it 500+ approved design files with annotations explaining what made them good - consistent spacing, proper contrast, grid alignment, typographic hierarchy. Then we built a prompt chain that scores new designs against these principles.
The system takes a screenshot, analyzes it, and outputs a structured report: grid compliance, spacing consistency, contrast ratios, hierarchy clarity, and an overall score.
What It Catches
The critic excels at mechanical issues: spacing that's 4px instead of 8px, contrast ratios that fail WCAG by a hair, alignment that drifts by a pixel across repeated elements. These are exactly the issues humans normalize but clients notice subconsciously.
Where It Surprised Us
It developed opinions we didn't expect. It flagged certain color combinations as "visually heavy" even when they passed contrast checks. It preferred left-aligned text layouts over centered ones. It consistently scored designs with more whitespace higher. These biases came from the training data - our own approved designs tend toward airy, left-aligned layouts. That was a mirror we didn't expect.
The Impact
Since deploying the critic, our revision rounds dropped from an average of 3.2 to 1.8 per project. Designers report feeling more confident presenting work because the obvious issues are already caught. Clients notice the polish without knowing why.