A weekly design wave: a designer role passes over every page and component (tabs first), fixes small things as pulls, and files design asks for next time #6286

Owner, 2026-10-26: "the horizontal tabs are pretty mid. Basically a designer pass on all the UI and components would be great. At the end the designers should also generate asks to make the experience even better next time. Like a designer wave weekly or something would be cool."

Done when: a weekly design wave runs on its own.

• A designer role on the crew (alongside builder, reviewer and planner). Its brief: taste, hierarchy, spacing, motion and accessibility, with the forge's design system (#5817, #6009) as the source of truth. It doesn't hand-roll one-offs.
• The wave, every week (e.g. Monday 08:00Z), as a scheduled routine:

1. Look, in a real browser: every top page and every component in the gallery (/design/components), at 390 px and 1440 px, light and dark, signed in and anonymous. Screenshots get attached. 2. Score each surface on a fixed rubric (clarity, hierarchy, density, consistency with the components, touch targets, contrast, motion, empty and error states), 1–5 each, kept per week so the trend shows. 3. Fix: small, self-contained improvements as pulls (before and after screenshots in each), preferring a fix in the shared component over a per-page patch. 4. Asks for next time: at the end, file the bigger ideas as issues labelled design-ask, each with the problem, a sketch or reference, and why it matters. These seed the next wave and the owner's queue. 5. A short wave report comment: scores this week vs last, what changed, top asks. It shows on the home feed (#5735).

• First wave targets (the owner named the first):

- The horizontal tabs ("pretty mid"): one tabs component, with a clear active state, good hit targets, overflow on phones (scroll or a "more" menu), and keyboard arrows. Used everywhere tabs appear. - The repo header (#6008). - The home feed (#5735). - Migrate (#5816). - The app template shell (#6009).

• Guardrails:

- No big-bang restyles: one component or page per pull, with visual tests (a screenshot diff in CI) so a pull can't silently break another page. - Respect the cold-read targets (#5735): designs that make a page harder to read in one glance don't land.

• KPIs:

Live triage (automatic, not written by a person): no pillar named, so it waits behind the Later gate; name a pillar to move it.