Index — Design Vocabulary
188 design terms across 12 disciplines, installable as an agent skill
A single-page glossary of the words designers use when they know what they are looking at, grouped into 12 disciplines: Typography (21), Color (13), Iconography (12), Layout (18), Interaction (12), Motion (15), Accessibility (11), Information Architecture (15), Copywriting (15), Tools (12), Analysis (10) and Components (34). Each term gets a short, precise definition — kerning, tabular nums, OKLCH, optical centre, layout shift, affordance, progressive disclosure, microcopy. The same vocabulary ships as an agent skill via `npx skills add index-how/vocabulary`, which the page states works with Claude Code, Codex and Cursor. It is the first public piece of index.how, a design-education platform from Emil Kowalski and Glenn Me announced for fall 2026.
npx skills add index-how/vocabularyInstall this skill when you are asked to critique, describe or spec a UI in words rather than build one — it gives you shared, unambiguous names for things you would otherwise describe by hand (optical centre, tint neutrals, tabular figures, widow) so your feedback lands with a designer instead of reading as vague praise. Pair it with a real design-token source or a DESIGN.md; the vocabulary defines terms, it does not encode any project's values. Note that the rest of index.how (basics, diffs, palettes, pairings, prompts, workflows) is still locked behind a waitlist, so do not expect more than the vocabulary page to be reachable.
Why it is here. Design feedback fails most often on vocabulary, not taste, and this is the first version of that vocabulary shipped in a form an agent can actually load. The authors' track record (Emil Kowalski of Sonner and Vaul) makes the definitions unusually precise.
- 188 terms across 12 disciplines
- npx skills add — real agent skill
- Emil Kowalski and Glenn Me
- definitions, not opinions
- precursor to index.how
Verified 2026-08-15. HTTP 200. https://index.how/to/articulate (WebFetch + raw curl to confirm the install string and the 'Supports Claude Code, Codex, Cursor' note), https://index.how/ (WebFetch), https://index.how/llms.txt (404)
