1 · minimalist-skilltaste-skill
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Five design engines, one identical brief.
Same copy, same product photo, same four sections, same facts. The only variable is which design skill generated the page — so what you are looking at is taste, not content.
Each frame below is the real page rendered at the selected viewport and scaled down. Open any one full-size to judge it properly; thumbnails flatten typography, which is most of what separates these.
What each engine actually enforced
| Engine | Hard rules it imposed | Where it pushed the page |
|---|---|---|
| minimalist-skill | Bans Inter/Roboto, bans gradients & heavy shadows, bans rounded-full on containers, forces 1px solid #EAEAEA everywhere, warm bone canvas, muted pastel accents only. |
Document-like. Reads as a Notion/Linear-adjacent workspace page. Calmest of the five, lowest sales pressure. |
| soft-skill | Variance engine picks a vibe + layout archetype; mandates nested double-bezel cards, button-in-button CTAs, custom cubic-beziers, py-24 minimum, floating glass nav. |
Agency-tier dark. Most expensive-looking, most motion, heaviest. Furthest from “minimal.” |
| taste-skill | Hero must fit the viewport, headline max 2 lines, subtext max 20 words, max 1 eyebrow per 3 sections, bans 3-equal-column cards, bans hand-rolled SVG icons, mandatory dark-mode tokens. | The only engine that cut the copy. Tightest hero, real dark mode, Phosphor icons. Most disciplined, least dramatic. |
| frontend-design | Commit to one bold direction; distinctive type pairing; atmosphere over flat color; one orchestrated load cascade; asymmetry and grid-breaking encouraged. | Took the biggest swing — a pre-dawn concept with a skewed amber band and a paper-stock mechanism section. Most memorable, least templated. |
| awesome-design-html | No taste rules at all. Supplies 118 real brand pages; fidelity to the chosen reference is the whole method. Tokens lifted verbatim from Linear. | Densest and smallest type (14px base). Looks like a dev-tool product page, not a DTC lander — faithful, but to the wrong category. |
On “modern minimal” specifically
1 and 3 are the real contenders. v1 is minimal as an aesthetic — warm paper, editorial serif, nothing shouting. v3 is minimal as a discipline — it is the only page that shortened the copy to make the hero fit, which is the harder and more valuable kind of restraint for a lander.
2 and 4 are not minimal, and shouldn't be judged as if they were. v2 is maximalist polish; v4 is a concept piece. v4 is the one most likely to stop a scroll, which matters more than minimalism if this ever runs as paid traffic.
5 is the cautionary arm. Reference-locking gives you a flawless Linear clone — including Linear's 14px body text and B2B density, which is wrong for a mom buying a $49 alarm for her teen. Great engine for cloning a look, bad engine for choosing one.
None of the four design skills mention skip links, theme-color, tap targets, or focus rings. All five pages failed the same eight interface-hygiene checks until Vercel's guidelines were run over them as a separate pass — which is the argument for keeping that command in the loop rather than trusting a taste skill to cover it.