Against the generic SaaS blue
How one rationed accent does more for credibility than a whole palette — and how to pick it.
Most studios start a project by opening a blank file. We start by loading three.
It sounds like a small thing. It is not. The blank file is where scope creep, inconsistency, and the slow agency death-march all begin. A project with no encoded context re-litigates every decision on every page.
The three files
CLAUDE.md holds engineering conventions. It never changes between clients. DESIGN.md holds the visual system — tokens, type, components, do and don't. CLIENT.md holds everything specific: goals, audience, pages, voice.
Encode the decision once. Reuse it everywhere. That is the entire trick.
When the model has all three in context, v1 arrives consistent instead of improvised. The work that's left is judgment, not janitorial — and judgment is the part worth a founder's time.
What this buys the client
Speed, obviously. But the quieter win is coherence: the fortieth page looks like it was designed by the same hand as the first, because it was — the hand is the system.