If you want the best UI design skills for Claude Code, start with this shortlist, chosen on install count, maintainer, license, audit status and fit: Anthropic's frontend-design, Vercel's web-design-guidelines, Taste Skill (design-taste-frontend), UI UX Pro Max, Impeccable, Emil Kowalski's emil-design-eng and apple-design, and Anthropic's theme-factory. Choose one skill to set visual direction, then add narrow ones for review, motion or theming.
How were these skills chosen?
This is a shortlist, not a ranking. Each skill has its own page on Kipt, where we read its SKILL.md, file list and license. On 24 October 2026 we checked each against five criteria:
- Install count. The figure on the skill's skills.sh page. skills.sh says its leaderboard "ranks skills based on anonymous telemetry data collected from the skills CLI," so it shows popularity through the CLI, not design quality.
- Maintainer. Anthropic and Vercel for official skills; for community skills, a named author with a public repo.
- License. MIT or Apache 2.0 for every pick.
- Audit status. skills.sh shows results from Gen Agent Trust Hub, Socket and Snyk. We report each Warn with the scanner's reason. skills.sh notes it "cannot guarantee the quality or security of every skill listed."
- Fit. Each pick does a distinct design job: visual direction, design data, critique, motion or theming.
Install counts are labeled "(snapshot, 24 October 2026)" because they change daily. Skills focused on code, such as React performance or shadcn/ui, are in the best frontend skills list.
How do the top UI design skills compare?
| Skill | Good for | Maintainer | Installs (snapshot, 24 October 2026) | License | Audits |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| frontend-design | Visual direction, no scripts | Anthropic | 1.0M | Apache 2.0 | 3 Pass |
| web-design-guidelines | UI review as file:line findings | Vercel | 779.1K | MIT (per README) | 2 Pass, Socket Warn |
| design-taste-frontend | Art direction checked in a browser | Leonxlnx | 670.1K | MIT | 1 Pass, 2 Warn |
| ui-ux-pro-max | Searchable styles, palettes and fonts | Next Level Builder | 412.7K | MIT | 3 Pass |
| emil-design-eng | Animation and interaction polish | Emil Kowalski | 383.7K | MIT | 3 Pass |
| impeccable | Critique, audit and polish commands | Paul Bakaus | 357.5K | Apache 2.0 | 2 Pass, Socket Warn |
| apple-design | Spring motion and gestures | Emil Kowalski | 240.5K | MIT | 3 Pass |
| theme-factory | Color and font themes for decks and pages | Anthropic | 94.9K | Apache 2.0 | 3 Pass |
What does each design skill do, and who is it for?
frontend-design
One SKILL.md that pushes Claude to pick a visual direction for your product, plan palette and type before coding, and avoid templated defaults.
- Suits: anyone starting a new page or app who wants a light, script-free design skill.
- Installs: 1.0M (snapshot, 24 October 2026). License: Apache 2.0. Audits: Pass from all three. Anthropic's skills repo calls its examples "provided for demonstration and educational purposes only."
- Kipt page: frontend-design skill
web-design-guidelines
Reviews UI code against Vercel's Web Interface Guidelines and reports each problem as a file:line finding: accessibility, focus, forms, motion and copy.
- Suits: a quick, consistent design and UX review before you ship.
- Installs: 779.1K (snapshot, 24 October 2026). License: MIT, stated in the README (no LICENSE file in the repo). Audits: Pass from Gen Agent Trust Hub and Snyk, Warn from Socket. Socket's 18 March 2026 audit lists one low-severity scanner flag, "System prompt extraction attempt," while its summary calls the skill's footprint "coherent and proportionate."
- Kipt page: web design guidelines skill
design-taste-frontend (Taste Skill)
Gives the agent an art direction drawn from a study of curated gallery sites, real images, and scripts that check the page at several widths in a real browser and fail banned patterns.
- Suits: landing pages, marketing sites and portfolios that keep coming out generic.
- Installs: 670.1K (snapshot, 24 October 2026). License: MIT. Audits: Pass from Gen Agent Trust Hub, Warn from Socket and Snyk. Socket's 20 October 2026 audit flags a low-severity anomaly in
assets/charts.js(a DOM-based XSS risk if chart data comes from an untrusted party) and finds no evidence of malware. Snyk's audit the same day lists W011 with a medium overall risk level, the finding itself scored low risk (0.10), because a script fetches images and footage from open public collections. - Kipt page: Taste Skill
ui-ux-pro-max
A local, searchable database of design knowledge (styles, palettes, font pairings, UX guidelines and stack-specific rules) that the agent queries with Python scripts before it designs.
- Suits: developers who want design choices backed by data rather than one default look.
- Installs: 412.7K (snapshot, 24 October 2026). License: MIT. Audits: Pass from all three. The scripts run locally with your Python.
- Kipt page: UI UX Pro Max skill
emil-design-eng
Emil Kowalski's rules for interfaces that feel right: whether something should animate at all, which easing and duration to use, and how controls should respond to a press. His README calls it "The main skill that consists of mostly animation, but also some design advice."
- Suits: frontend developers whose animations feel slow or off.
- Installs: 383.7K (snapshot, 24 October 2026). License: MIT. Audits: Pass from all three.
- Kipt page: emil-design-eng skill
impeccable
Adds one /impeccable command with 24 sub-commands for shaping, critiquing, auditing and polishing a frontend, plus a detector for common AI-generated design tells. Its README says it started from Anthropic's frontend-design.
- Suits: developers who want a shared design vocabulary and repeatable critique passes.
- Installs: 357.5K (snapshot, 24 October 2026). License: Apache 2.0. Audits: Pass from Gen Agent Trust Hub and Snyk, Warn from Socket. Socket's 20 October 2026 audit flags a low-severity anomaly in
scripts/modern-screenshot.umd.js, noting "No definitive malware indicators." The plugin also installs hooks, so review them before unattended runs. - Kipt page: Impeccable skill
apple-design
Apple's approach to fluid, physical interfaces rewritten for the web: springs instead of fixed durations, gestures that track the finger, motion that can be interrupted, plus reduced-motion rules.
- Suits: drawers, sheets, carousels and other touch-heavy UI that should feel native.
- Installs: 240.5K (snapshot, 24 October 2026). License: MIT. Audits: Pass from all three.
- Kipt page: apple-design skill
theme-factory
Ten ready color and font themes and a short process for applying one to a slide deck, document, report or HTML page, or building a new theme from your description.
- Suits: anyone who wants generated decks and pages to look consistent.
- Installs: 94.9K (snapshot, 24 October 2026). License: Apache 2.0. Audits: Pass from all three.
- Kipt page: theme-factory skill
How do you install a design skill in Claude Code?
Use the command on the skill's skills.sh page. It runs the open source skills CLI:
npx skills add https://github.com/anthropics/skills --skill frontend-design
npx skills add https://github.com/emilkowalski/skills --skill emil-design-eng
The CLI docs list -a claude-code to target Claude Code and -g to install for every project. Claude Code reads personal skills from ~/.claude/skills/ and project skills from .claude/skills/, per the Claude Code skills docs. Some of these skills also document their own installers or plugins; each Kipt page lists them. For other agents, see Codex skills and Cursor skills.
How do you choose between overlapping design skills?
Four of these skills set visual direction: frontend-design, Taste Skill, UI UX Pro Max and Impeccable. Installing more than one tends to give Claude conflicting rules, so choose by how much machinery you want:
| If you want | Consider |
|---|---|
| One Markdown file, no scripts | frontend-design |
| A browser check that fails generic layouts | design-taste-frontend |
| Design data to search before choosing a style | ui-ux-pro-max |
| Named commands for critique and polish | impeccable |
Then add narrow skills that don't compete: web-design-guidelines for review, emil-design-eng or apple-design for motion, theme-factory for decks and documents. Tell the agent your brand constraints up front, since opinionated skills will otherwise apply their own house rules.
Why do some design skills show audit warnings?
The three skills with Warns all ship scripts or fetch outside content: Taste Skill fetches images and drives a browser, Impeccable bundles a screenshot library and hooks, and web-design-guidelines fetches its guideline file at runtime. Socket labeled each of its findings low severity, Snyk scored its W011 finding low risk within a medium overall risk level, and none of the audits reported malware. The practical step is the same for any skill: read the SKILL.md and scripts before you install, and install into a single project first.
Where should you keep the design skills you choose?
Design briefs and brand rules get reused, so it helps to keep them next to your skills. Kipt stores prompts and Agent Skills as Markdown in a private GitHub repo you own. You can import a skill from a GitHub link, a folder or a .zip, and install your whole library into Claude Code or Codex with npx skills add https://github.com/<you>/<repo>.git --all -g. To turn a brand brief into a skill of your own, try the free SKILL.md generator.
For a deeper look at the most installed pick, read the frontend-design skill guide, or see the best Claude Code skills overview.