Open Design Guide

Open Design guide

This skill does not contain the library. It knows how to find it and how to use it well.

The library is a local, offline clone of the content half of Open Design. Plain files. No od binary, no daemon on port 7456, no desktop app.

Step 1: locate the library

Read ~/.claude/open-design-guide.local.md. Its library: field is the absolute path to the clone.

If that file does not exist, the library is not installed. Stop and tell the user to run:

"${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/scripts/install.sh"

Do not guess a path and do not fall back to the network. One clone, one recorded location.

Step 2: find the right entry

Read CATALOGUE.md at the library root. That is the index: every design system grouped by category with its real tagline, every skill, every template.

Never guess a folder name. Names are not obvious (linear-app, not linear).

Step 3: read the entry, then work

Design systems live at design-systems/<name>/.

Read DESIGN.md first. It is the brand contract and it governs every other file in the folder: the atmosphere, the typographic logic, the reason a color exists. Skipping it and grabbing tokens.css alone produces output that has the right hex codes and the wrong soul.

Then take real values from tokens.css or design-tokens.json, and copy component markup from components.html. Once a system is in play, invent nothing: no new colors, no new spacing steps, no new type scale.

USAGE.md covers how the authors intend the tokens to be applied. DESIGN-<lang>.md files are translations of the same contract, useful when writing UI copy in that language.

Skills live at skills/<name>/SKILL.md. Self-contained instructions for one job: taste and anti-slop passes, GSAP animation, image-to-code, redesigns, brand extraction, design briefs. Read the whole file before acting on any part of it. Some are long on purpose.

Design templates live at design-templates/<name>/SKILL.md. Rendering shapes: decks, editorial documents, video frames, device mockups, social cards.

Rules

• One design system per artifact. Mixing two produces mush.
• The clone is read-only reference material. Never edit it, never commit into it. Copy what you need into the project being built.
• Ship no attribution to Open Design in the output. It is Apache-2.0 source material, not a credit line.
• Around 91 folders under skills/ are stubs: frontmatter plus a link to an upstream repo, no instructions of their own. CATALOGUE.md leaves them out on purpose. If the user names one, open its SKILL.md for the upstream URL and say the real bundle has to be fetched separately.

Updating

Rerunning the install script pulls the latest content and rebuilds CATALOGUE.md.

"${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/scripts/install.sh"