The rules come in the box
The AI kit ships with a DESIGN.md written by the designer, and an AGENTS.md that tells Claude Code or Cursor to read it before every change. This is the start of Stairwell’s, as delivered.
Each kit is tested with real prompts in Claude Code and Cursor before it goes on sale.
# Stairwell · DESIGN.md
## Never change
- One setting, no accent. --oxide behind every page, header and footer; --frost for headings, text, rules, frames, buttons and focus; --lichen for captions and small labels only, never rules or borders. Never a second background, a tinted block or a dark band. To rebrand, change --oxide only, keeping frost on it at 4.5:1 or more.
- Type: Encode Sans only. H1 once per page (the page title), H2 for section titles and big names, body for paragraphs and names in lists, caption size for labels, prices, navigation and buttons. Titles never end with a full stop. Sentence case; the large name is lower case.
- Buttons: one filled button (.btn, frost with an oxide label) per section at most, for the main action ("Contact the studio" or the page's own verb such as "Apply"); every other action is an underlined link (.lnk). No arrows, no outlined buttons.
- Photos: black and white, hard noon light, sharp shadows, concrete, plaster, stairs and walls, tight frames, straight verticals, no people, no text or logos. Inside a section a photo is always framed (.fig); only a full-width photo band (.band, .invite) has no frame. At most two bands per page, never two in a row, none on text pages.
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