Open Design

🎨 The open-source Claude Design alternative. 🖥️ Local-first native desktop app for macOS and Windows. ⚡ Composable skills, brand-grade DESIGN.md design systems, and ready-to-use plugins. 🖼️ Generates web · desktop · mobile prototypes, live dashboards / artifacts, decks, images, video, plus HyperFrames motion graphics. 🔒 Sandboxed iframe preview · HTML / PDF / PPTX / MP4 export. 🤖 Runs on Claude Code · OpenClaw · Codex · Cursor · OpenCode · Qwen · Copilot · Amp · Hermes · Kimi · Antigravity and 25 distinct local CLI executables, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint via BYOK.

Open Design is what you get when the agent-native loop Anthropic shipped with Claude Design — discover the brief, lock the direction, stream the artifact, critique, deliver — stops being closed and becomes a filesystem of functional skills, rendering design templates, design systems, and plugins that the coding agents already on your laptop can read, write, and remix. Your CLI becomes the design engine, your laptop becomes the studio, and your team's DESIGN.md becomes the brand contract.

It's also the Figma alternative for the agent era — instead of pushing pixels on a canvas, it delivers single-page artifacts in real CSS, real fonts, real components, exported straight to HTML / PDF / PPTX / MP4 — already shaped by your design system, already runnable inside the agent you use every day.

Product tour

A quick look at what Open Design is and what it does. Start from Home, orchestrate repeat workflows with Automation, distill a brand contract in Design System, and extend with Plugins and integrations; inside any project's Studio, the same design system streams out prototypes, live artifacts, HyperFrames, decks, and images.

Core pages

Studio — many artifact types in one project

Inside a project's Studio, the same design system streams out multiple artifact types:

Demo

Four core product categories, all rendered by a coding agent running on your laptop. Click a thumbnail to see the real example.

1 · Prototypes — web · desktop · mobile

The default output surface. Single-page HTML artifacts that read your DESIGN.md and render in a sandboxed iframe.

Entry view — pick a skill, pick a design system, type the brief. One surface for prototypes, dashboards, decks, mobile apps, magazine pages.	Mobile prototype — pixel-accurate iPhone 15 Pro chrome, multi-screen flows. The agent never redraws the phone frame; shared device frames live in assets/frames/.
Web prototype — an editorial dashboard with scrollbars, KPIs, and charts. Rendered straight from design-templates/dating-web/.	Mobile app prototype — a three-screen gamified flow with XP ribbons and quest detail. Hand off straight to Cursor / Codex / Claude Code to turn into React/Next/Vue.

2 · Live artifacts & dashboards

Live dashboards, decision rooms, KPI walls — single-page artifacts that pull data through a tweaks panel and stay editable in place.

Live dashboard — an editable KPI wall whose tweaks panel surfaces the parameters worth nudging. The agent emits a manifest, and the iframe re-renders without a reload.	Decision room — a multi-source briefing artifact for product / research / ops meetings.
GitHub-style dashboard — repo metrics presented as a live artifact.	Flow live-dashboard template — a domain-specific KPI template, branded through the active DESIGN.md.

3 · Decks — magazine decks, weekly updates, pitches

Deck mode (guizang-ppt) — magazine layouts, WebGL hero, P0/P1/P2 checklists. Bundled verbatim from op7418/guizang-ppt-skill with its original license preserved.

Swiss International-style deck — grid-anchored, monochrome accents. One of 15 deck templates and 36 themes under design-templates/html-ppt-*/.

Every deck exports to HTML (single file, inlined assets), PDF (browser print, deck-aware), PPTX (agent-driven skill), ZIP (archive), or Markdown.

4 · Images

93 ready-to-replicate prompts live in prompt-templates/ — preview thumbnails, full prompt body, target model, aspect ratio, and source attribution. One click drops a brief into the composer.

5 · Video & HyperFrames — agent-native motion graphics

HyperFrames is HeyGen's open-source, agent-native video framework, integrated as a first-class citizen in Open Design. The agent writes HTML + CSS + GSAP, and HyperFrames renders it to a deterministic MP4 via headless Chrome + FFmpeg. Pair it with Seedance 2.0 for cinematic t2v / i2v, Veo 3 / Sora 2 / Kling 2 for routed model variants, and Suno v5 / Lyria 2 for the audio layer.

30s SaaS product promo · 16:9 · UI 3D reveals	TikTok karaoke talking-head · 9:16 · TTS + word-synced captions	30s brand sizzle reel · 16:9 · audio-reactive kinetic type	Bar chart race · 16:9 · NYT-style data infographic
Flight map · 16:9 · Apple-style route reveal	4s cinematic logo outro · 16:9 · piece-by-piece assembly + bloom	$0 → $10K money counter · 9:16 · Apple-style hype	Website-to-video · 16:9 · captures the site at 3 viewports

11 HyperFrames templates + 39 Seedance prompts ship with the repo. Catalog thumbnails © HeyGen; the framework is Apache-2.0. The OD-specific render workflow (composition cache, sandbox-exec workaround, MP4-as-chip) is detailed in design-templates/hyperframes/.

Why Open Design

In April 2026, Anthropic released Claude Design — the first time an LLM stopped writing prose and started delivering design artifacts directly. It went viral. But it stayed closed-source, paid-only, cloud-only, locked to Anthropic's model, Anthropic's skills, Anthropic's surface. No checkout, no self-host, no Vercel deploy, no swap-in-your-own-agent.

Open Design (OD) is the open-source alternative. Same loop, same artifact-first mental model, none of the lock-in:

• 🤖 Agent-native, model-agnostic. We don't ship an agent. The claude / codex / cursor-agent / copilot / hermes / kimi already on your PATH are the design engine. Swap with one click.
• 🧠 Brand-grade by default. Every render reads the active package's DESIGN.md as the core brand contract. 151 design-system packages ship with the repo; legacy packages may be DESIGN.md-only, while newer packages can add manifest.json, tokens.css, components, assets, and provenance. Drop a folder in, the picker finds it.
• 🖥️ Local-first, BYOK at every layer. Native desktop apps for macOS (Apple Silicon + Intel) and Windows (x64). Linux AppImage on the optional release lane. Product analytics and session replay are consent-gated; scrubbed safety and reliability telemetry is always on.
• 🌍 Composable on four planes. Plugins carry runnable workflows · functional skills carry agent behavior · design templates carry rendering blueprints · design systems carry the brand. All four use portable, versionable directories that anyone can author and publish.
• 🔁 Refresh an existing codebase. Hand a git repo + DESIGN.md to the agent and it refactors your real components to the brand spec. Dedicated plugins migrate Figma / Pencil workflows into React / Next.js / Vue code.
• 🔒 Privacy by conviction. Everything runs where your data lives — your laptop, your team's server, your Vercel project. When the network is needed, the BYOK proxy is SSRF-guarded.

Comparison

Skills and design templates

100+ functional skills ship in skills/. Each follows the Agent Skills SKILL.md convention and supplies reusable agent behavior, references, or utilities. Renderable starters live separately in design-templates/; they may also use SKILL.md, but they populate the design-template catalog rather than the functional-skill registry.

Two modes anchor the design-template catalog: prototype (web/mobile/desktop single-page artifacts) and deck (horizontal-swipe presentations). Other templates cover image, video, audio, and utility surfaces. The scenario field groups templates by audience: design · marketing · operation · engineering · product · finance · hr · sale · personal.

Design Systems

151 brand-grade design-system packages centered on DESIGN.md ship with the repo. Legacy packages may contain only that Markdown contract; newer packages can also carry manifest.json, compiled tokens.css, component fixtures, assets, and provenance evidence. The catalog mixes upstream-derived systems with project-owned additions; Switch a system → the next render uses the new tokens.

Plugins

277 official plugins plus 183 remixable reference examples live in plugins/_official/. Each entry is a portable plugin directory anchored by open-design.json plus the payload required by its type: for example SKILL.md for agent workflows, template.json for media templates, or DESIGN.md for design-system entries. Jump straight to a category:

What plugins can do

• 🤖 Run in any coding agent — Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Copilot, OpenClaw, Antigravity, Hermes, Kimi… through the same skill protocol the agent already knows.
• 🔁 Migrate Figma / Pencil workflows → React, Next.js, or Vue source. See od-figma-migration.
• 🛠️ Refresh an existing codebase to a brand spec — point a plugin at a git repo + DESIGN.md, get a PR. See od-code-migration.
• 💾 Persist custom workflows — your team's reusable templates sit next to the shipped ones.

A full workflow — from brief to artifact

brief → plugin → direction → design system → artifact → handoff → memory

1. A PM submits a brief. The plugin picker offers landing page · pitch deck · dashboard · social post · PM spec · OKR scorecard…
2. A designer (or the agent) locks the direction. No brand? Pick from 5 curated directions. Have a brand? Drop a screenshot / URL → the agent connects GitHub, imports Figma, and codifies a reusable DESIGN.md.
3. The agent creates the first deliverable. Plugin + functional skill or design template + DESIGN.md are bound. Filesystem-backed CLI runs write canonical project files and the preview follows them; BYOK/plain-API runs without file tools return one complete <artifact> block.
4. Hand off to engineering. The artifact is real HTML/CSS — drop it into Cursor, Codex, or Claude Code to keep building as code. Or export PPTX / PDF / MP4 straight to marketing.
5. Open Design gets smarter as you use it. Your screenshots, fonts, palettes, and confirmed artifacts accumulate as defaults for the next session. Less rework, less drift.

Platform Compatibility

Open Design ships as skills, a CLI, and an MCP server that mainstream coding agents consume natively. Once OD is installed, a single od mcp install <agent> wires the MCP server into that agent's config, and you call the same tools from inside any agent.

od mcp install <agent> --print for a dry-run preview · --uninstall to remove · full list with od mcp install --help.

No CLI installed? The BYOK proxy at POST /api/proxy/{anthropic,openai,azure,google,ollama,senseaudio}/stream gives you the same loop (no process spawn) — paste baseUrl + apiKey + model, with presets for OpenAI, Atlas Cloud, Anthropic, Azure OpenAI, Google Gemini, Ollama, LM Studio, vLLM, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Atlas Cloud uses https://api.atlascloud.ai/v1 with your own key and OpenAI-compatible model ids such as qwen/qwen3.5-flash. Per-target SSRF protection blocks internal IPs / link-local / CGNAT at the daemon edge.

Security model

Read-only by default, the daemon binds to 127.0.0.1, and SSRF is blocked at the proxy edge. LAN exposure requires an explicit OD_BIND_HOST plus OD_ALLOWED_ORIGINS. Connector credentials and live-artifact preview routes stay loopback-only regardless.

Internally-hosted model endpoints. To prevent SSRF, the daemon blocks provider base URLs that resolve to private/internal address ranges (RFC1918, link-local, CGNAT, and cloud-metadata IPs) by default, surfacing "Internal IPs blocked". If you run an internally-hosted gateway (e.g. LiteLLM or Ollama on a VPN-only 10.x/192.168.x address), opt that host out with OD_ALLOWED_INTERNAL_HOSTS=<host1>,<host2>,... — a comma- or whitespace-separated list of bare hostnames or IPs (10.0.0.5, litellm.internal.corp; a host:port or full URL is accepted and reduced to its hostname; IPv6 must be bracketed, e.g. [fd00::1]). The allowlist is strict opt-in (empty by default), exact-host (no subdomain/substring matching), and applies only to provider endpoints you configure (connection test, model discovery, BYOK chat). It deliberately does not relax the guard on download URLs returned inside upstream responses, which stay blocked. A malformed entry — or CIDR notation, which is not supported — is dropped with a warning rather than silently trusted, so a typo never quietly widens (or fails to widen) the guard. Allowlisting a hostname trusts whatever it resolves to (like OD_ALLOWED_ORIGINS); allowlist the resolved IP instead if you want the DNS-resolved address re-checked.

Roadmap

• [x] Daemon + 26 runtime definitions across 25 distinct coding-agent CLI executables + skill/design-template registries + design-system catalog
• [x] Web app + chat + question form + 5-direction picker + todo progress + sandboxed preview
• [x] 100+ functional skills · separate rendering-template catalog · 151 design-system packages · 5 visual directions · 5 device frames
• [x] SQLite-backed projects · conversations · messages · tabs · templates
• [x] Multi-provider BYOK proxy (/api/proxy/{anthropic,openai,azure,google,ollama,senseaudio}/stream) with OpenAI-compatible presets including Atlas Cloud + SSRF guard
• [x] Claude Design ZIP import (/api/import/claude-design)
• [x] Sidecar protocol + Electron desktop + IPC automation
• [x] Artifact lint API + 5-dim self-critique pre-emit gate
• [x] 0.8.0 — plugin marketplace infrastructure (261 official plugins, manifest spec, per-agent install scripts)
• [x] 0.9.0 — Open Design Cloud (official model service built into the app: zero config, one-click sign-in)
• [x] 0.10.0 — the all-in-one design workspace: the whole craft loop in one window (references → material → interactive editing → motion → handoff)
• [x] 0.11.0 — The Bazaar: built in the open — a community marketplace of plugins and design systems anyone can pick from and contribute to
• [x] 0.12.0 — Brand-backed Design System: turn the brand you already own into a reusable, portable DESIGN.md system
• [x] 0.13.0 — Stay in Flow: native session resume, faster model picking, and export straight to screenshot-backed PPTX / PDF
• [x] Packaged Electron builds — macOS (Apple Silicon + Intel) + Windows (x64) + Linux AppImage (optional lane)
• [ ] Comment-mode surgical edits — partially shipped; reliable targeted patching in progress
• [ ] AI-emitted tweaks panel UX — not yet implemented
• [ ] npx od init to scaffold a project with DESIGN.md
• [ ] Plugin SDK + od plugin {add,list,remove,test,publish} CLI
• [ ] Figma / Pencil → React / Next / Vue migration plugins (alpha)
• [ ] Refresh-existing-codebase plugin (point at a git repo + DESIGN.md)

References & lineage

License

Apache-2.0. Bundled skills and templates with their own LICENSE files retain those licenses, including design-templates/guizang-ppt/ (MIT, @op7418), design-templates/html-ppt/ (MIT, @lewislulu), and skills/web-clone/ (MIT, @Jane-xiaoer).