Turn any brand, product, event or sentence into an original printed piece from the cel era.
One look, applied to anything:
cel-era anime drawing + a limited set of printing inks + visible paper + one period print format + title lettering with a katakana echo + press wear
Everything this skill makes is a printed object: a poster, a package label, a magazine cover, a tee print, a record sleeve, a zine page. Never a full-colour digital illustration, never a screenshot, never a painted background. The drawing is 1980s anime; the medium is always ink on paper.
The subject is always the star. The anime look is only how it gets drawn.
All generated with this skill. Brands and products are invented for the examples.
| Coffee launch | Headphones | Ramen shop |
|---|---|---|
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| One-sheet, orange + violet + teal | Colour field, poster red + cream + marigold | Colour field, marigold + black + red |
| Milk carton | Sardine tin | Skincare bottle |
|---|---|---|
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| Package label, hot pink + violet + lemon | Package label, pink + maroon | Package label, green + magenta |
| Tea house print | Bike shop merch | Tea pouch |
|---|---|---|
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| One-ink screenprint, inverted cobalt | One-ink screenprint on tee and tote | One ink on kraft, oxblood |
| Sunscreen brand | Photo exhibition | Sneaker drop |
|---|---|---|
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| Magazine cover, cream + pink + denim | Colour field, pale sky + coral | One-sheet, cream + red + sky blue |
| Field study zine | Vinyl night | Record sleeve |
|---|---|---|
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| Riso overprint, vermilion + blue | Riso overprint, green + magenta | Colour field, mint + magenta + teal |
| Radio show | Gym | Bookshop |
|---|---|---|
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| Type sandwich, cobalt + seafoam + blush | Type sandwich, orange + violet + teal | Pencil plate, oxblood on kraft |
| System | Direction |
|---|---|
| Input | A brand, product, event, phrase, theme or supplied photo |
| Formats | One-sheet, colour field, one-ink screenprint, package label, magazine cover, riso overprint, type sandwich, pencil plate |
| Inks | 1 to 3 per format, on paper or a light-to-mid ink ground; the hue rotates and is never blue by default |
| Drawing | Traced keyline, two tones per surface, clumped hair, hard-edged shadows, no gradients |
| Era | Early 80s, late 80s (default), early-90s pastel, late-90s noir |
| Lettering | Condensed titles, worn display words, katakana logotypes and markers, mastheads, billing blocks |
| Wear | Paper speckle, stipple, riso grain, misregistration, halftone, folds, edge wear |
| Output | A generated image, the exact prompt, and a recipe |
- Posters: launches, events, shop prints, brand statements
- Packaging: tins, pouches, bottles, cartons, boxes, labels
- Merch: tees, totes, stickers, pencil boards, record sleeves
- Social: covers, podcast art, campaign words
- Publications: zine pages, magazine covers, flyers
1 Read the brief -> subject, brand anchors, intent, words, katakana echo
2 Route the format -> package, one-sheet, merch, cover, riso, pencil, type, colour field
3 Set the inks -> the format's budget, a rotated hue, brand colour in the hero slot only
4 Draw by the law -> keyline, two tones, clumped hair, flat printed background, one motion device
5 Generate, inspect -> print feel, brand anchors, pose physics, ink count, lettering, one money shot
The hue rotates with the subject. Food, beauty and youth lean hot pink, magenta, coral and marigold; nightlife, music and tech lean magenta, cyan and violet; outdoors and sport lean vermilion, teal and marigold; quiet, literary and botanical lean oxblood, indigo and green.
| Swatch | Palette | Inks |
|---|---|---|
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Poster Red | #E4473F · #F6EBD8 · #2A1A1C · #F4C21B |
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Hot Pink Violet | #F0559B · #3A1C63 · #F7D64A |
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Marigold Black | #F3B92B · #141018 · #D8362E |
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Mint Magenta | #BFE8DA · #D6246E · #0F4C4A |
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Bubblegum Maroon | #F3A6C3 · #7B1846 |
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Cream Cobalt | #EDE6D9 · #1D4FB6 |
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Kraft Indigo | #E4D2BF · #3B4CC2 |
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Kraft Oxblood | #E8D9C3 · #8C2F39 |
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Rice Cobalt Mint | #EBE9E2 · #1E3FBF · #5CD1B2 · #F28B8B |
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Sunset Orange Violet | #F7EFE2 · #F2662B · #6A3D9E · #17A2A2 |
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Poster Red Sky | #EFE7D7 · #7FB4D8 · #D6281E · #111111 |
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Riso Vermilion Blue | #EFE9DE · #EE4A36 · #2A38C8 |
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Riso Magenta Green | #F2EEE6 · #3D9A71 · #E7236E |
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Masthead Pop | #F6F1E7 · #EB4B73 · #2A1A1C · #6D9BC9 |
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Masthead Teal | #F6F1E7 · #17B2B8 · #2A1A1C · #F7D64A |
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Sky Coral | #CFE6F2 · #FF6B5A · #2A1A1C |
Regenerate it after editing anything in system/:
python scripts/build_swatches.py
python scripts/build_board.py- It is printed, and the paper shows. Limited inks on a light-to-mid ground, never black, with 25-45% of the sheet left as open ground. No painted scenery, no photoreal depth.
- Two tones per surface. One flat base plus one hard-edged shadow. Gradients only as an airbrushed sheen on a glossy hero product.
- Hair is clumped shapes, never individual strands. The keyline is traced and slightly broken, never a thin vector line.
- The product stays readable. Its identifying silhouette appears whole and unobstructed, with no invented logos or decals.
- Poses have contact points. Something visibly carries the weight.
- The title locks to the figure, with an 8x or greater scale jump. Japanese is a short katakana echo or nothing.
- The hue rotates. No two pieces in a series lead with the same colour.
- Characters are original. No franchise characters, logos, titles or taglines.
- not a full-colour digital anime illustration or a screenshot
- not modern anime rendering: soft skin shading, gradient irises, bloom, lens flare, bokeh, 3DCG
- not vaporwave clichés: grid floors, palm trees, scanline sunsets, decorative Japanese
- not a styled product scene with hands, plants and props around the package
- not invented logos, sponsors, URLs, QR codes or rating badges
- not a dark, heavy sheet: no black grounds, no grunge, no torn or distressed borders
- not an existing anime character with the serial numbers filed off
git clone https://github.com/m-mahadi/anime-80s-skill.git ~/.claude/skills/anime-80sRestart Claude Code. Other agent environments can load SKILL.md directly.
Use anime-80s to make a launch poster for my coffee brand Night Shift Roasters.
It opens Friday 14 November and the brand colour is #0B6E4F.
Design a tin label for Harbour Sardines in 80s anime style.
Two inks, and keep the tin's own rim and pull ring outside the print.
One-ink anime screenprint for a tee for my bike shop Spoke & Co.
It has to still read at t-shirt size.
Turn this sneaker photo into retro anime key art for our drop.
Keep the colourway and the silhouette exactly as they are.
Old anime magazine cover for my podcast The Quiet Hour, here's my photo.
Keep my glasses and my hair, and put the show name in the masthead.
Show our three hot sauces as one 80s anime poster.
One bottle as the hero, the other two small underneath in a single ink.
Riso overprint flyer for a vinyl night called SIDE B.
Magenta and green, and let the two plates overlap somewhere.
Make the word "soft" into a giant-word anime poster.
Add the katakana of the word down one side.
Colored-pencil plate for a tea shop called Slow Leaf.
One pencil on kraft paper, and one small handwritten word.
Make a brand statement poster for my headphone brand HUSH.
Keep it airy: I want a lot of the paper still showing.
A square record sleeve for a city pop reissue called Night Bus.
Mint ground, and the bass player glancing back over her shoulder.
Make a poster, a tin label and a tee print for my strawberry milk brand.
Give each one a different lead colour, and don't default to blue.
A late-90s noir anime poster for my bar.
Original character please, nothing from an existing show.
Prompt only: a package label for a skincare line called Dew Lab.
I'll generate the image myself.
One run returns:
- the generated image;
- the exact compiled prompt used to make it;
- a recipe naming the format, era, inks, shot, lettering, wear, and one line on what makes the piece original.
If no image generator is available, the skill returns the production-ready prompt and says so rather than pretending it rendered something.
python scripts/validate.py
python scripts/run_evals.pyvalidate.py checks that every format resolves to a real palette, shot and lettering role, that palettes stay inside their ink budgets, that hexes and ratios are well formed, that every ground is light enough to keep the sheet airy, and that the evals only reference IDs that exist.
run_evals.py is the executable half of the eval suite. It implements the routing rules from SKILL.md — format, palette, era, shot, ink budget, prompt-only — and checks all 12 briefs against their assertions. Image-level constraints (pose physics, open ground, brand anchors, lettering) cannot be machine-checked, so it lists them as human review rather than reporting them as passing.
Both run in CI on every push and pull request, along with a rebuild of the swatches and board that fails if the generated assets have drifted from the catalogs.
anime-80s/
├── SKILL.md Trigger rules, the direction, the workflow, the quality gate
├── system/ formats, palettes, lettering, eras, wear
├── examples/ Generated examples and the design system board
├── swatches/ One SVG per ink family, generated from the catalog
├── evals/ Representative briefs with deterministic assertions
├── scripts/ Validator, eval runner, swatch and board builders
├── .github/ CI that runs both checks and the asset rebuild
├── REFERENCES.md What each research reference taught the skill
├── CHANGELOG.md Release history, including what was cut and why
└── README.md
This skill extracts system-level qualities: print formats, ink limits, cel drawing rules, lettering roles, wear. It does not copy any reference's composition, wording, logotype or character. Supplied products and people are preserved as content while the format, crop, inks, lettering and layout are newly built.
The workflow structure — resolve a brief into a manifest, compile a prompt, validate against machine-readable catalogs — is adapted from mono-color-skill by Yan Liu, used under MIT. Its "keep the paper visible" discipline is the rule this skill's look is built on. The formats, ink families, cel rendering law, lettering roles, eras and wear system here are new.
The thirteen research references that informed the visual analysis are indexed in REFERENCES.md. They are not stored in this repository and remain the property of their creators and rights holders. Several show existing franchise characters; the originality firewall in SKILL.md forbids reproducing them.
The skill instructions, catalogs and scripts are MIT licensed. See LICENSE.
The generated examples in examples/ are © 2026 Moniruzzaman Mahadi. Brands, products and characters in them are invented for demonstration.
Created by Moniruzzaman Mahadi