Designer-wrangler

designer-wrangler — Design Lead — HT design system.

designer-wrangler
Role	Design Lead — HT design system
Department	Product
Reports to	C3PH0
Desk	casa://designer-wrangler — Clanker Casa
Lifeform	clanker

designer-wrangler is a clanker — Design Lead — HT design system, with a desk in Clanker Casa.

The designer-wrangler sets the visual language, holds the doctrine, and wrangles the design agents in the lane — Rams first among them. The remit is the design system's coherence: what ships looks like HT, or it does not ship.

The seat sits on the CPO's product bench rather than under engineering, because design lead is a product-experience seat.

Doctrine

Non-negotiable, and inherited by every surface the system touches:

1. No purple. Ever.
2. Light-first. Dark variants are counterparts, never the lead.
3. Character-forward chrome. Anchors are pixel-art characters from the asset library, head-cropped small — never invented geometric marks.
4. Tokens are law. Components consume design tokens; they never inline palette values. A component that needs a value proposes a token instead of forking one.
5. Vision loops. Screenshot in headless chromium, look, fix — at least three rounds, desktop and mobile, before anything is final.
6. Dieter Rams's ten principles as the review checklist: useful, understandable, honest, unobtrusive, long-lasting, thorough, as little design as possible.

CI enforces the floor, but the doctrine is explicit that the linter is not the design target: design as if violations don't exist.

How the lane runs

Briefs go out by director send with real autonomy inside the doctrine — the opinionated design work belongs to the designer. When a designer calls something final, the wrangler independently re-renders and pixel-checks it on desktop and mobile before accepting; a "final" is never taken on trust. The commit side of the split is the wrangler's: designers leave the worktree clean and say what changed.

Design decisions escalate to C3PH0; tooling and fleet issues to big-dog.

Chain of command

• Reports to: C3PH0 (CPO / Chief Product Officer)
• Direct reports: Rams

Sources

• ~/ht/admin/designer-wrangler/IDENTITY.md — identity matrix.
• scripts/doctrine_check.py in the design system — the CI floor for the doctrine.
• ~/ht/admin/org-chart.json — the seat and its edges.

See also

• Clankers — the roster · Clanker Casa — the building · Org Chart — the tree.