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Vol. 01 · Issue Nº 26 v0.2.0 Apache-2.0 MMXXVI

Designing intelligence on warm paper.

The open-source studio for editorial documents, white papers, and one-pagers — typeset by your own coding agent.

31 Skills 72 Systems 12 Agents · BYOK
Manifesto · Nº 01

We treat your existing coding agent as a creative collaborator, not a black box. Open Design gives it 31 composable skills and 72 brand-grade design systems, then steps out of the way. The output is a real file — not a prompt — that you can hand to a client tomorrow.

— Open Design Studio Berlin · Open · Earth · 52.5200° N · 13.4050° E
31
Skills
file-based, shippable today, drop-in compatible with Claude Code.
72
Design systems
portable DESIGN.md tokens — Linear, Vercel, Stripe, Apple, kami…
12
Agent CLIs
auto-detected on your $PATH; switch backends in one keystroke.
3
Commands
from git clone to first artifact, locally and offline.

01

What it is

A local-first design studio for the agent you already trust.

Open Design is the open-source alternative to Anthropic's Claude Design. It runs on your laptop. Your agent reads a folder of SKILL.md files and a folder of DESIGN.md systems, then produces real files — landing pages, decks, white papers, one-pagers, mobile prototypes, dashboards.

Skills supply behavior. Systems supply taste. Adapters bridge agents. BYOK respects your wallet. Every output is portable HTML or Markdown — no proprietary file format, no vendor lock-in.

  • Files, not opaque prompts — every skill is a folder of Markdown.
  • Deterministic visual directions, not random generation.
  • Sandboxed iframe preview, real cwd, exportable artifacts.
Three commands · 30 seconds
# Clone, install, launch the local daemon.
git clone https://github.com/nexu-io/open-design
pnpm install
pnpm tools-dev

02

How it feels

Editorial discipline, not chat-window improvisation.

A new project starts with a 30-second question form: brand, audience, scale, language. The agent picks one of five visual directions in OKLch, locks the type stack, and writes the artifact to disk. You can read every file it touched.

Every iteration is reviewed in a sandboxed iframe preview, with comment-mode anchors on every editable element so you can give targeted feedback instead of restating the whole brief. Re-runs are deterministic — same brief, same output.

The result is the difference between looks AI and looks shipped. One brush tag per page by convention; everything else stays solid hex.

03

What ships next

Q2 2026 — packaging, multi-tenant tokens, daemon hardening.

The roadmap is public. Three threads we're pulling on right now:

  • Packaged desktop builds — signed Mac, Windows NSIS, Linux AppImage, all sourced from tools-pack.
  • Multi-tenant brand tokens — one running daemon, many tenants; OD_DATA_DIR and OD_MEDIA_CONFIG_DIR already laid the groundwork.
  • Daemon-side artifact persistence — every render is a file on disk under .od/artifacts/ with a stable SHA, so design history survives every agent restart.

Nothing in this list requires a paid plan. Open Design will stay Apache-2.0 forever; the studio earns by selling brand-grade design systems, not by gating the runtime.

Open Design · Apache-2.0 · MMXXVI Composed in kami · 紙 · 纸 · paper-first