I’ll admit it: I’m not a designer. I can spot good design, but producing it is another story. My last blog redesign was a two-tool grind—Google Stitch to generate layouts, then Claude Design to refine them. The result was fine. Passable. The kind of “fine” you stop noticing because you’re tired of looking at it.
Then I installed Hallmark as a Claude Code skill and told it to redesign my blog and homepage. What came out was so much better it made the old version look embarrassing.
Here’s how it actually went.
It asked before it assumed
The first thing Hallmark did wasn’t generate anything. It asked about scope: just the blog, or everything? That one question already put it ahead of the usual “here’s 12 layouts, pick one” slot-machine approach. It wanted to know what it was working on before it started working.
Then it went quiet and analyzed. Not for show—when it came back, it came back with four distinct design directions. Not four variations of the same idea. Four genuinely different takes, each with a rationale.
I picked a direction, then it offered variations
Once I chose a direction, it didn’t just run. It surfaced a second round of decisions—variations within that direction, including whether I wanted dark mode. Small thing, but it’s the difference between a tool that designs for you and one that designs with you. I got to steer twice: once on the big direction, once on the details.
Then it worked. For 40+ minutes.
This is the part that sold me.
Hallmark didn’t spit out HTML and call it done. It drove a headless browser, took screenshots, and checked its own work—desktop and mobile, because I’d asked for both. It iterated. Rendered, looked, adjusted, rendered again. For over forty minutes it did the loop that I always skip when I’m rushing: actually looking at the thing on a real screen at real breakpoints and fixing what’s off.
That’s not prompt-and-pray design generation. That’s the workflow a careful front-end engineer follows—verify against the running page, not the mental model of it.
The result
Here’s the honest comparison. First, the old design—hand-wired from Google Stitch and Claude Design:
And here’s what Hallmark produced:
Compare the two—there’s no contest. Hallmark’s version is tighter, more coherent, and it just feels considered in a way the old one never did.
Takeaway
If you’re building a web page or want a redesign, go look at the Hallmark skills. The magic isn’t that it generates designs—everything generates designs now. It’s that it interrogates scope first, gives you real choices instead of noise, and then verifies its own work in a real browser until it’s right.
For someone who isn’t a designer, that’s the whole game. It doesn’t just hand me pixels. It does the part I’d skip.
