Index — Design Vocabulary

188 design terms across 12 disciplines, installable as an agent skill

Tier A · StrongAgent SkillReferenceArticleindex.how

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.

Install

npx skills add index-how/vocabulary

For an agent

Install 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.

Install command, framework, licence and component list.

Facts

License: Unknown
Pricing: Free
Framework: Not applicable
Styling: Not applicable
Distribution: Agent skill / rules pack, CLI installer, Article, thread, or post
Platform: Web
Content type: Prose / writing
Agent readiness: Agent skill or rules pack, CLI installable, Structured documentation
Accessibility: Not applicable
Maturity: Beta

Notable for

188 terms across 12 disciplines
npx skills add — real agent skill
Emil Kowalski and Glenn Me
definitions, not opinions
precursor to index.how

Provenance

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)

Also in Agent Design Tooling

index.howTier A