The creative-direction skill now exposes five named operations — frame, explore, visualize, converge, and refine — each with a dedicated reference, so craft detail loads only when the operation needs it.
A route rule (inherit, extend, originate) selects how much invention the work warrants; inherit runs no divergence and no visual step when a direction already exists for the surface.
Divergence generation in explore draws referents from the audience's own world — publications, instruments, maps, architecture, packaging, signage — rather than from other software products, so candidate directions stop converging on the category default.
The visual step in visualize is capability-gated: it defaults to a text schematic in any harness that cannot produce images, with a named skip rather than a blocker, and produces a rendered comp only on the originate route when the harness supports it.
Asking to refine an existing direction now reaches the skill and amends the document in place, instead of starting a second direction for the same surface.