Opening the vault…
Opening the vault…
Design context for coding agents · pre-launch
Trova is a vault of design references, each one filed by aesthetic family and annotated by hand with the specific move worth stealing. It serves those notes to Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Copilot — anything that speaks MCP, the protocol agents fetch context through — while the build is happening.
In the vault · pulled as this page loaded
#0B0D10
#1C2B33
#E8ECEE
#7FD4C1
Every entry answers three questions
Provenance, always: the source gallery, the live URL, the day it was caught. Taste without receipts is just vibes.
8 aesthetic families, from Vast-Quiet Cinematic to WebGL Maximalist. Sorted, not piled.
The forcing function, and the whole reason this is a library rather than a folder. Nothing gets filed without a steal-note in your own words — human-written, every time. The vault refuses machine opinions.
The note · steal type: motion/interaction · written by hand
Camera dolly through 3D ice responds to scroll velocity, not position — fast scrolls feel like skidding. Inertia as a material property.
The vault talks to your agent
Trova ships an MCP server — MCP is the open protocol coding agents use to call outside tools. Mid-build, your agent pulls steal-notes, palettes, and font pairings straight from the vault, so its suggestions argue from a point of view instead of the internet’s average.
One command in Claude Code, a few lines of config in Codex, Cursor, or VS Code. The field guide covers the setup.
> build the hero section for a developer-tools landing page
I'll start by pulling the design direction from the Trova vault, as the project instructions require.
● list_families() · 8 families
● design_context(family: "print-tech", section: "hero")
● search_steals(q: "monospace spec sheet annotation callout")
The vault is unambiguous on fit here: Print-Tech Paper — “software presented like a beautifully printed manual” — is the family for a developer tool. I'm honoring its steal-notes literally:
· Datasheet as brand voice → the hero carries a real spec block, part number, revision code
· Commerce as engineering paperwork → the CTA is an order form with [x] checkboxes, not two buttons
· Clearspace with measurement callouts → dimension lines bracket the headline
There are two keys. The owner’s key — the one that captures references and writes steal-notes — is taken, and sign-ups for it open at launch. The other is a bearer key for your agent: read-only, no account, on sale today. The corpus stays sealed; what’s for rent is the taste.
28 references · 61 human-written steal-notes · 26 of them in the last 30 days
Rent the taste →● Write(hero.tsx) · 366 lines
A real session, verbatim — nine turns, one 366-line file.
And the same server, right now
→ search_steals(q: "hero")
[typography] 'MOULIN ROUGE' is repeated three times on stacked lines with one oversized red 'M' spanning all three as a shared initial. Repetition used as texture rather than emphasis — the name becomes a pattern block. Works for a hero wordmark: set the word three times, let one letter run the full stack height. — from "Toulouse-Lautrec — Moulin Rouge: La Goulue" (Editorial) [grid/layout] There is no grid. Type sits in four clusters at four different scales, placed wherever the illustration leaves room, and the foreground figure crops through the bottom headline so image and lettering interlock instead of occupying separate bands. Steal for editorial hero art: let one element break the type's bounding box. — from "Toulouse-Lautrec — Moulin Rouge: La Goulue" (Editorial)
Answered live as this page loaded — not a mockup.