DESIGN.md is README.md for visual identity
A useful file format arrived quickly. The work now is to stop its surrounding ecosystem from becoming a pile of incompatible approximations.
DESIGN ENGINEERING
Design engineering.
How agents learn taste, and where the tooling is still thin.
Google Labs released DESIGN.md as a plain-text way to describe visual identity to coding agents. Design tokens have a settled machine-readable format in DTCG, while DESIGN.md extractors, catalogs, and design skills are still finding their shape. These notes keep the layers separate: what a file says, how it is produced, and how an agent can use it.
Essays06
DTCG already won
DESIGN.md is useful prose for agents. Its tokens should reuse the Design Tokens Community Group (DTCG) format, not invent a new one.
Nobody publishes extraction accuracy
Design extraction products disclose uncertainty in their copy, but none in this research publishes a fidelity benchmark against ground truth.
Design skills are pre-consolidation
Agent skill files are popular, but no shared contract yet says what a design skill covers, where its values come from, or what it defers to.
The open UI dataset gap
There is still no open, current corpus of real user interface (UI) screenshots that is safe to redistribute. Live scrapers and paywalled galleries fill the gap.
ASCII density fields: tone from type
A technique note on shading with glyph density in one flat color, taken from a Bakers Studio experiment and rebuilt under Velofy's house rules.
Spec01
Field guide to sources11
TypeUI
A registry, command-line tool, and hosted Model Context Protocol server for reusable design-skill files.
DesignMD
A credit-based generator that turns a website address into DESIGN.md, with a command-line tool and Figma import.
designmd.supply
An MIT-licensed reference implementation for generating DESIGN.md from a public domain.
Refero Styles
A public gallery of interpreted, agent-readable style references for product websites.
getdesign.md
A browsable frontend for a large community collection of reverse-engineered DESIGN.md files.
CollectUI
A long-running user interface inspiration gallery whose output is images for people, not files for agents.
Design.md Store
A free-to-download library of unofficial brand-inspired DESIGN.md packs.
Design Extractor
A credit-based service that turns a website into DESIGN.md, with web, Chrome, and Model Context Protocol interfaces.
transitions.dev
A copy-paste catalog of interface transitions, with a command-line installer and a skill for coding agents.
ai-design-skills
A small MIT-licensed collection of prescriptive Markdown playbooks for coding agents.
Sona UI
A source-owned React and Tailwind component registry with layered agent-discovery files.