Skip to content
Gloss v2.0.0
Source

Refusals

A consolidated checklist of generated-interface tells this system refuses to produce — for auditing a new screen before it ships.

Generated interfaces converge on a small set of shapes: the eyebrow over a headline, the icon tile above a card title, the softly-glowing dark theme. None of them are accidental omissions here — each is already refused by a rule on the relevant foundation page. This page exists only to put all of them in one place, so a new screen can be checked against the whole list at once instead of five pages in sequence. These are laws, not preferences: a screen that breaks one is off-system.

Surface & elevation

  • No cream or beige page. The stock is warm but held close to neutral.
  • No side-accent bar on a card, no four-sided border, no border around a bounded surface at all — surface contrast does the identifying work.
  • No decorative grid, stripe field, or radial glow. Flat color only.
  • No radius above --gl-radius-lg on a card, no custom corner value outside the token scale.
  • No dark theme with colored glows.

Type & hierarchy

  • No kicker or eyebrow above a heading. A heading is already the top of its own hierarchy.
  • Uppercase and tracking stay on type-label. Never on body copy, never on a heading.
  • No gradient text. No italic serif display headline.
  • Adjacent steps in the type scale are 1.2–1.25 apart — not enough contrast on their own. Skip a step between a heading and the body under it.
  • A heading gets more space above it than below it.

Layout & structure

  • No card inside a card. One level, then spacing and rules do the rest.
  • A grid of cards is fine when each card is a real, distinct object. What's refused is the decorative version — identical icon-and-heading cards standing in for a list. Repeated, uniform items belong on a CardRow list.
  • No icon tile stacked above a heading. An icon sits beside its label, in flow.
  • No decorative numbered section labels. A number appears only when it's real data.

Motion

  • No pulsing status dot. Status is a Badge — tone plus mono uppercase text, on no background. It never animates on its own.
  • No blinking cursor in non-editable copy, no marquee, no bounce or elastic easing.
  • No hover scale on imagery. Animate transform and opacity, never width or height.

Copy

  • At most two em-dashes in a passage. Commas, colons, and periods carry the same joins without the cadence.
  • No “not X, a Y” aphorisms, and no manufactured contrast as a closing line. State the thing once.
  • Nothing gets dismissed as “theater.” Say plainly what a thing does or does not do.

Each rule above is already enforced on its own foundation or component page — Color, Elevation, Typography, and Motion — and in the Voice section of SKILL.md. This page only collects them into one list.