Hallmark: A Design Skill That Shuts Down the AI-Slop Defaults in Generated Pages

Unconstrained coding assistants produce a recognizably flat default look on every page; Hallmark replaces subjective "design taste" with machine-checkable gates, so teams can fail a build in CI or an editor hook on an eyebrow label or a fake form instead of eyeballing each output.

Hallmark exists to make assistant-generated pages stop looking generated. Instead of nudging models with fancier prompts, it writes the telltale signs of "AI slop" into rules — eyebrow kickers above headings, letterspaced uppercase labels, one gradient word in a title, card-inside-card layouts, a mail-capture box on every page, submit buttons that do nothing — and then checks them with tooling. The build flow starts with a preflight that reads the project's fonts, palette, and locked design.md, then deals three of 48 material themes while a log prevents consecutive builds from converging. Only the hero is built first; after a fresh-context subagent reviews it, the rest of the page follows.

The checker is sloplint, a zero-dependency script that renders pages in a real browser and measures above-the-fold fit, contrast, focus rings, section rhythm, and whether text collides with edges. Gates are tiered into Floor (never waivable), Reflex (waivable with a recorded reason), and Finish (advisory). A separate fresh-context reviewer, whose criteria the builder never sees, gives a final ship or rebuild verdict. For existing pages, `/hallmark redesign` records every link and form field before touching anything, then fails the rebuild if any of them disappears. Photos come from a 755-image Wikimedia Commons library, credited on the page, and fabricated numbers, testimonials, and logos are banned outright.