Rams Design Review: design feedback in plain words

I wanted something that could criticize my work in a simple way. So I built a Claude skill that reviews a design against Dieter Rams' ten principles of good design and names the principle behind every mistake.

It's free and it's for any designer who wants quick feedback.

Try it: rams-design-review.sevcovicp.workers.dev · GitHub

Why Rams

I think people tend to overthink design and try to put too much on one screen. That's why Rams: his tenth principle is "as little design as possible." The skill asks of every element: what breaks if you remove it? That keeps a design easy to navigate and keeps the focus on solving the right problem.

How it works

1. Share the design. A screenshot, a Figma link, a live URL or UI code.

2. Answer up to four questions. The goal of the screen, who uses it, how finished it is, and what it has to follow (design system, brand, platform).

3. Get the review. A one-line verdict, then every issue ranked by severity with where it is, what's wrong, which principle it breaks and a concrete fix. It ends with a table covering all ten principles.

It only reports real problems. A clean design gets a short review.

A screenshot isn't enough

The first version just looked at the image. Then I realized a picture can't tell you what the screen is for. Whether a section is useful or noise depends on the user's goal. Whether a missing detail is a mistake depends on whether it's a wireframe or a final design.

So I added a short round of questions before the review. It only asks what the design doesn't already answer, and a wireframe doesn't get flagged for pixel polish.

Feedback you can learn from

Every finding is linked to a specific principle. That's the part I like most: you don't just get a list of fixes, you learn which principle you broke and why. It can teach you to be a better designer.

Here's the verdict from the example on the site, a review of my own app Forgettable:

The toggles mean two different things, so you can't tell whether a check is done or just a reminder that is switched on.

The full review lists seven issues, from that toggle ambiguity (#4 Understandable) down to Android-style all-caps buttons on iOS (#3 Aesthetic).

How I worked

I built the whole thing with Claude in one morning. I set the direction and made the calls: the questions round, which designs to test it on, and publishing it. Claude drafted the skill instructions, the site and the deploy config. The skill lives on GitHub and the site runs on Cloudflare Workers.

Try it

Download SKILL.md from GitHub, add it to Claude, then ask "Review this with Rams principles" and attach your design.