OpenDesign

Why this exists

Claude Design on claude.ai is excellent. But it's locked.

Locked to the browser. Locked to Anthropic models. Locked to the web app — which means no access to your local files, no integration with your existing design system, and no way to use it inside the editor where your actual work happens.

I built OpenDesign to fix that. Same philosophy as Claude Design — structured intake, context-matching, taste, a verifier that checks the output against the brief — but packaged as portable markdown skills you can install in Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Gemini CLI, or OpenCode. It runs locally, reads your codebase, and works with whatever model you're on.

You own it. You can read every skill, fork it, and extend it.

What it does

OpenDesign turns your AI coding agent into a designer with taste, opinions, and the discipline to restrain them. HTML is the output medium. Inside that medium it embodies whichever specialist the task calls for — deck designer, UX designer, prototyper, brand designer.

It doesn't generate generic AI output. It reads your actual codebase first.

OpenDesign extracting a live design system from a real codebase — colors, typography, tokens, all sourced directly from src/app.css.

Showcase

Ten skills ship together. One is the entry point (opendesign); the others are loaded on demand by the workflow.

Available skills

How the skills work together

opendesign is the front door. On invocation it:

1. Scans ./opendesign/design-systems/*/ for existing systems (looking for SKILL.md or tokens/colors_and_type.css as markers).
2. Announces what it found and picks the right one, asks, or offers to create one.
3. Runs a structured intake if the work is new.
4. Routes to the specialist skill for the artifact (deck → make-a-deck, prototype → interactive-prototype, etc.).
5. Forks a verifier subagent to review against the brief.

Design systems created by create-design-system are written to ./opendesign/design-systems/<name>/ so opendesign can auto-discover them in future sessions. Multiple systems per project are supported — a marketing system, a product system, a deck template — and the agent picks based on task shape.

Installation

Note: Installation differs by platform.

Claude Code

/plugin marketplace add manalkaff/opendesign
/plugin install opendesign@opendesign

Cursor

In Cursor Agent chat:

/add-plugin opendesign

Or search for "opendesign" in the plugin marketplace.

OpenAI Codex CLI

Open the plugin search:

/plugins

Search for opendesign and select Install Plugin.

OpenAI Codex App

In the Codex app, click Plugins in the sidebar, find OpenDesign in the Design section, click the +, and follow the prompts.

Gemini CLI

gemini extensions install https://github.com/manalkaff/opendesign

To update:

gemini extensions update opendesign

OpenCode

Tell OpenCode:

Fetch and follow instructions from https://raw.githubusercontent.com/manalkaff/opendesign/main/.opencode/INSTALL.md

Fork

Fork the repo, add your own skills under skills/, and install your fork through whichever host you use.

Usage

Once installed, invoke with /opendesign and describe what you want. The agent picks up the right skills on its own.

/opendesign make a pitch deck for a seed-stage AI company, 10 slides

/opendesign design a settings page for this React app — use our existing design system

/opendesign explore a few options for the onboarding flow. rough sketches, nothing polished yet

/opendesign extract our design system from the codebase and document it

Upgrading

If you installed via the plugin marketplace, run /plugin update opendesign inside Claude Code.

If you cloned or submoduled, git pull in the repo.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md. Quality bar is higher than coverage — consider extending an existing skill before adding a new one.

License

MIT