Claude Code Design Skills 2026: 8 Free Skills to Stop the AI Look

Hi, this is Darius. Ask Claude for a landing page and you can usually guess the result before it loads: a cream background, a big serif headline, a purple button and three rounded cards. Anyone who has seen a few AI-built sites recognizes it.

One developer went through 125 Reddit threads asking why AI sites all look the same and found the same 13 tells again and again. The right skills fix most of them. These are the 8 Claude Code design skills I’d install, all free on GitHub, in the order you’d build a page, from the first design direction to the final polish. For each one you’ll see what it does, an example, the cost and the limitation to know about.

Watch the full video: Best Claude Code Design Skills (8 Free, No More AI Slop) · 11:42

Why AI websites look the same

Language models choose the most common option when nobody tells them otherwise. In web design that adds up to one recognizable page:

The Unslop UI project counted 13 such tells across 125 Reddit threads and more than 3,000 comments. Each skill below removes some of them, whether by planning the design first, restricting the defaults or reviewing the result.

How popular are these Claude Code design skills?

Install counts show which of these skills people use most. Anthropic’s Frontend Design leads with almost a million installs.

1. Frontend Design: Anthropic's own design skill

Without direction, Claude reaches for the same safe design every time, which is why so many AI sites look alike.

Frontend Design is Anthropic’s official design skill and the most installed skill in this list. It asks Claude to work like a design lead whose client has already rejected anything that looks like a template.

What it does

• Before it writes code, Claude drafts a short plan: four to six named colors, the typefaces and a rough layout sketched in plain text.
• It then reviews that plan against your brief and replaces anything generic before building.
• The skill names the five looks AI design keeps falling into. One of them uses Claude’s own orange.
• The subject decides the style, so a toy shop and a finance dashboard come out looking nothing alike.

npx skills add https://github.com/anthropics/skills --skill frontend-design

Would rather skip the code entirely? I reviewed a no-code option in my Webira review.

2. Taste Skill: three dials for how bold it gets

AI design tends to come out either bland or overdone, and a prompt gives you no precise way to ask for something in between.

Taste Skill by Leon Lin replaces vague adjectives with three numbered dials, each running from 1 to 10.

What it does

• Variance runs from strict symmetry to artistic chaos. Motion runs from static to cinematic. Density runs from an airy gallery to a packed cockpit.
• It reads your brief, writes a one-line design read and sets the dials for you. A landing page starts at roughly 8, 6 and 4.
• It blocks the fonts AI picks by default, like Inter and the two serif faces AI loves most, and limits you to one accent color.

npx skills add https://github.com/Leonxlnx/taste-skill --skill design-taste-frontend

3. UI UX Pro Max: colors and fonts for your industry

A spa and a bank need different palettes, yet AI tends to give both the same one.

UI UX Pro Max from Next Level Builder chooses a design system that suits your type of business.

What it does

• It searches a library of 192 product types, each with its own palette, along with 74 font pairings, 50 styles, 25 chart types and 119 UX guidelines.
• It hands Claude the colors, fonts, layout and a list of mistakes to avoid, like purple and pink gradients on a banking app.
• Claude can then build the result in any of 22 tech stacks.

/plugin marketplace add nextlevelbuilder/ui-ux-pro-max-skill
/plugin install ui-ux-pro-max@ui-ux-pro-max-skill

4. Hallmark: the feel of a site you love, without copying it

When you ask Claude to make your site look like one you admire, you tend to get a weak copy of it.

Hallmark from Together AI takes a page’s design DNA and leaves its pixels and content behind.

What it does

• Its study mode takes a screenshot or a link, names the layout, the font pairing and the main color, then rebuilds your own content with them.
• It never copies photos and refuses links to paid template marketplaces.
• It can also build from scratch with 21 themes, audit existing code or redesign a page while keeping your copy.
• Before it returns anything, it scores its own work and runs 57 slop tests.

npx skills add nutlope/hallmark

Need logo mockups to go with the new look? See my Claw Brand AI review.

5. shadcn: real buttons, forms and dialogs

AI apps tend to break in the small parts: a popup without a title, a form field without a label, a menu made of plain boxes.

The shadcn skill comes from the team behind shadcn/ui, the open source component library, and it makes Claude use real components in place of hand-built imitations.

What it does

• It reads your project setup first, then pulls the docs and examples for each component it needs.
• It checks every component it adds and follows rules for styling, forms and accessibility, such as every dialog needing a title.
• One preset code can switch the theme and fonts of the whole app.

npx skills add https://github.com/shadcn-ui/ui --skill shadcn

6. GSAP skills: smooth scroll animations with GSAP

Scroll animations from Claude often stutter, or break as soon as the page changes.

The GSAP skills are the official set from GreenSock, the team behind the GSAP animation library.

What it does

• There are eight skills covering timelines, ScrollTrigger for scroll effects, the plugins, React, Vue and Svelte, and performance.
• The performance rules teach Claude to animate position and size without forcing the browser to recalculate the layout.
• They also teach Claude to clean up its animations when a component leaves the page.

npx skills add https://github.com/greensock/gsap-skills

7. Web Design Guidelines: about 100 rules from Vercel

A page can look finished and still fail people: a button a screen reader cannot name, an image without a description, text that spills off a phone screen.

Web Design Guidelines from Vercel reviews your UI code against Vercel’s Web Interface Guidelines.

What it does

• The guidelines hold about 100 rules in 17 groups, from accessibility and forms to animation, dark mode and performance.
• It downloads the latest rules before every review, so the checklist stays current.
• Every problem comes with its file and line number, plus an explanation when the fix is not obvious.

npx skills add https://github.com/vercel-labs/agent-skills --skill web-design-guidelines

8. Impeccable: 24 commands and a slop detector

Most design skills help once, at the start. Every fix after that is up to you.

Impeccable is by Paul Bakaus, the creator of jQuery UI. It gives you and Claude a shared design vocabulary of 24 commands that you can use for as long as the project lives.

What it does

• polish is the final pass and critique is a UX review. bolder livens up a dull page, quieter calms a loud one and harden deals with errors and edge cases.
• You run init once and it records who the product is for, so every later command takes that into account.
• Its detector catches 61 problems, like purple gradients, bounce easing and tap targets that are too small. It runs without AI or an API key, and in Claude Code it checks after every edit.
• Live mode lets you click an element in your browser and try different versions of it.

npx impeccable install

How to install Claude Code design skills

You can install every skill on this list without typing a command yourself:

1. Open Claude Code in the desktop app, the terminal or your code editor.
2. Type Install this skill: and paste the skill’s GitHub link from this article.
3. Claude downloads it and puts it in the right place. Start a new chat so the skill loads.
4. Ask for the design work in plain English, or call the skill directly, such as /impeccable critique.

Each section above also lists the exact install command for these Claude Code design skills. Impeccable uses its own installer, npx impeccable install, run from your project folder.

Frequently asked questions