Open Design has launched as an open-source alternative to Anthropic's Claude Design, offering a local-first approach that puts user control front and center. The tool auto-detects 11 coding agents on your PATH—including Claude Code, Cursor Agent, Gemini CLI, and GitHub Copilot CLI—transforming them into a design engine. It ships with 31 composable skills and 72 brand-grade design systems from companies like Linear, Stripe, and Vercel.

The project emerged after Anthropic released Claude Design on April 17, 2026, which quickly went viral but remained closed-source, cloud-only, and locked to Anthropic's models. Open Design takes a different path: it's BYOK at every layer, deployable locally or to Vercel, and lets users swap agents with a single click. An OpenAI-compatible proxy also allows DeepSeek, Groq, or self-hosted vLLM as backends.

The workflow enforces pre-flight checks: users complete an interactive form locking in their brief before any generation, then pick from five visual directions with deterministic OKLch palettes. A live todo plan streams in real-time while artifacts render in sandboxed iframes, with five-dimensional self-critique running against the output. Exports ship as HTML, PDF, PPTX, MP4, or ZIP under Apache-2.0 licensing.