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Claude Design Skill

A portable Claude skill that turns Claude into an expert designer for HTML-based artifacts — landing pages, slide decks, interactive prototypes, animated videos, posters, wireframes, and visual explorations.

Adapted from Claude.ai's internal Design product system prompt, restructured to follow the Claude Skill specification with progressive disclosure (lean SKILL.md + on-demand references + copy-paste starter assets + real sample outputs).

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Contents

• What it does
• Skill architecture
• Installation
• Usage
• When it triggers
• Demos
• Test prompts
• Customization
• License
• 中文 README

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What it does

When you ask Claude to design something — a deck, a landing page, a prototype, an animation — this skill activates and gives Claude:

• Fact Verification (Priority #0). Before assuming anything about a named product, the skill enforces a WebSearch. A 10-second search beats 1–2 hours of rework on wrong premises.
• The Core Asset Protocol. For branded work, a 5-step hard flow for gathering assets — with logo / product shots / UI screenshots treated as first-class citizens, not colors-and-fonts-only. Writes findings to brand-spec.md.
• Design Direction Advisor. When the brief is too vague ("design me something nice"), the skill switches into advisor mode, proposes 3 differentiated directions from a library of 10 design philosophies spanning 5 schools, and waits for the user to pick before committing.
• Output-format playbooks — design canvas, slide deck, interactive prototype, timeline animation, wireframe. Each with a skeleton and gotchas.
• Variation strategy — when to ship N side-by-side options vs. a single prototype with Tweaks (live in-design controls for colors, typography, variants).
• Anti-slop discipline — explicit rules against aggressive gradients, emoji bullets, rounded-cards-with-left-border, CSS-silhouettes-as-product-shots, gradient-orbs-representing-AI, and other machine-generated tells.
• React + Babel traps that silently break inline-JSX prototypes (style-object scope collisions, Babel scope isolation, integrity hashes).
• Starter templates you can copy-paste: a self-scaling deck stage, a design canvas, a prototype shell, a Tweaks-enabled page, a timeline animation engine, and device frames for iOS / Android / macOS / browser.
• 3 real demo artifacts you can open right now to see what the skill produces.

The skill is environment-agnostic — it does not depend on Claude.ai's internal artifact tools. It works in Claude Code, the Claude Agent SDK, or any environment where skills load.

Skill architecture

claude-design-skill/                # repo root — the skill itself
├── SKILL.md                        # entry point — workflow + priority rules + routing
├── README.md / README.zh.md        # bilingual READMEs (skill-agnostic, not read by agents)
├── LICENSE
├── references/
│   ├── fact-verification.md        # Priority #0 — WebSearch before assumptions
│   ├── workflow.md                 # questions, context-gathering, iteration pattern
│   ├── brand-context.md            # Core Asset Protocol — 5-step hard flow
│   ├── design-styles.md            # 10 design philosophies × 5 schools, for Advisor mode
│   ├── design-principles.md        # anti-slop, craft rules, content discipline
│   ├── output-formats.md           # deck / canvas / prototype / animation / wireframe skeletons
│   ├── variations-and-tweaks.md    # variation mix, Tweaks protocol (host + standalone)
│   ├── react-babel.md              # pinned versions, scope rules, integrity hashes
│   └── verification.md             # what to check in a real browser before "done"
├── assets/
│   ├── deck-stage.html             # slide deck with scaling, nav, localStorage, print-to-PDF
│   ├── design-canvas.html          # labeled variant grid
│   ├── prototype-shell.html        # React + Babel loader (pinned + SRI)
│   ├── tweaks-starter.html         # live-editable design with Tweaks panel
│   ├── animations.jsx              # Stage / Sprite / useTime / interpolate / Easing
│   └── device-frames.md            # iOS / Android / macOS / browser frame CSS
├── demos/
│   ├── demo-1-deck.html            # Swiss Editorial 5-slide pitch
│   ├── demo-2-canvas.html          # 4 hero variants across design schools
│   └── demo-3-prototype.html       # Interactive 3-screen iOS reading tracker
├── test-prompts.json               # 6 scenario test cases covering the main branches
└── docs/images/                    # README screenshots

The whole repo IS the skill. SKILL.md sits at the root, so npx skills add and any Agent-Skills-spec-compliant CLI find it immediately.

Installation

Option A — npx skills (recommended)

Works across 40+ coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenCode, Gemini CLI, Cline, …). Install globally:

npx skills add jiji262/claude-design-skill -g

Or into a specific project:

npx skills add jiji262/claude-design-skill

Target a specific agent with -a (e.g., -a claude-code, -a cursor), or use -y for non-interactive CI installs. See the full flag list in the skills CLI docs.

Option B — clone + symlink into Claude Code

If you want to track the repo yourself (for customization, contributing, etc.), clone it and symlink into ~/.claude/skills/:

git clone https://github.com/jiji262/claude-design-skill ~/code/claude-design-skill
ln -s ~/code/claude-design-skill ~/.claude/skills/claude-design

Symlinking (vs. copying) means git pull updates the installed skill automatically. Start a new Claude Code session and the skill will auto-register.

Option C — reference from a plugin

Include this repo (or a subfolder) as a skill inside a Claude Code plugin. See the plugin authoring docs for the expected plugin layout.

Option D — manual invocation

Without installation, point Claude at SKILL.md directly and ask it to follow the instructions.

Usage

Just ask Claude to design something. The skill triggers on phrases like:

• "Make a pitch deck for …"
• "Design a landing page for …"
• "Prototype this onboarding flow"
• "Animate this concept"
• "Turn this screenshot into a clickable mockup"
• "Show me 3 options for the hero"
• "Create a poster for …"
• "Build a wireframe storyboard for …"
• "Design something nice — I don't know what style I want" (triggers Advisor mode)
• "Make a launch video for " (triggers Fact Verification + Asset Protocol)

Claude will:

1. Verify facts if the brief names a specific product/version/event — WebSearch first.
2. Gather design context — push for a codebase, design system, UI kit, or reference brand rather than designing from thin air.
3. Hunt brand assets if the task is branded — logo, product shots, UI screenshots, then colors/fonts.
4. Enter Advisor mode if the brief is too vague — propose 3 differentiated directions from different schools.
5. Declare the visual system before placing pixels.
6. Build an initial artifact with placeholders, show it to you early, then iterate.
7. Ship multiple variations spanning conservative → novel.
8. Verify the artifact loads cleanly in a real browser before calling it done.

When it triggers

The skill is designed to be "a little pushy" — it activates on common design phrasings even when the user doesn't say the word "design." See the description field in SKILL.md for the full trigger list.

It does not trigger on general frontend coding tasks (fixing a bug, refactoring a component) — those are handled by regular coding flows, not the design skill.

Demos

Open these directly in a browser — no build step. Each is a real sample of what the skill produces:

1 · Slide deck (Swiss Editorial)

demos/demo-1-deck.html — 5-slide pitch deck, Swiss Editorial style (Pentagram / Vignelli lineage). Oversized folios, hairline rules, one accent color. Keyboard navigation, 1-indexed slide labels, localStorage persistence.

2 · Design canvas (4 hero variations across schools)

demos/demo-2-canvas.html — 4 hero variations for the same fictional product, drawn from 4 different design schools (Swiss Editorial / Kenya Hara minimalism / Brutalist web / Editorial magazine). Shows the Advisor mode pattern in action.

3 · Interactive iOS prototype (live state)

demos/demo-3-prototype.html — Interactive 3-screen iOS reading tracker. Click the "+5p / +20p / Finish" buttons on the detail screen and watch state propagate across all three phones live.

See demos/README.md for a walkthrough of what to notice in each demo.

Test prompts

test-prompts.json contains 6 realistic scenario tests, each tagged with the guardrails it exercises:

1. Vague landing-page brief → Advisor mode kicks in
2. Named-brand task → Fact Verification + Core Asset Protocol
3. Pitch-deck → system discipline + scale floors
4. Motion design → time discipline + no gradient-orb-for-AI
5. iOS prototype → real image sources + information density + React pinning
6. Tweaks vs. N separate files → variation strategy

Use these to self-check the skill or seed your own eval harness.

Customization

• Add your brand/system as a bundled reference. Drop your brand guide, design tokens, or UI kit as Markdown/HTML in references/ or assets/, and update SKILL.md to point Claude at them.
• Tighten the trigger surface. Edit the description frontmatter in SKILL.md to narrow or broaden when it fires.
• Swap starter templates. The files in assets/ are explicit starting points — rewrite them to match your house style and Claude will use your versions.
• Extend the style library. Add entries to references/design-styles.md with the same (pitch / flagship / keywords / signature-moves / when-to-use) structure.
• Add new output formats. Add a new file under references/ (e.g., references/email-designs.md) and reference it from SKILL.md.

Design philosophy

This skill stays intentionally lean: markdown + small HTML starters + a few sample outputs, nothing binary. The core conviction is that good hi-fi design grows from existing context (brand, codebase, UI kit) rather than from scratch — so the skill's primary job is to make Claude gather real context, commit to a visual system, and avoid the pre-trained path of least resistance that leads to AI-slop. Every rule, reference, and asset here serves that goal.

License

MIT. See LICENSE. The original Claude Design system prompt content is Anthropic's; this repository contains an adapted, restructured rendition intended for use with the Claude Skill specification.

Special Thanks

linux.do