designer-skills

The Designer Skills Pack

Design skills for the agent era, written so an AI agent can actually use them.

273 skills and 76 commands across 33 plugins, in five collections, for Claude Code and Gemini CLI.

Not sure which skill you need? Start with the skill index — every skill in this repo arranged by the situation you're in, plus the pairs most often mistaken for each other.

Getting started (no coding needed)

These skills run inside an AI coding assistant. The easiest place to use them is Claude Code, and it takes three steps. No terminal required.

1. Get Claude Code. It's a free app from Anthropic (claude.com). Download it, sign in, and open it. You only do this once.

2. Add the suite. In Claude Code, type this and press enter:

/plugin marketplace add Owl-Listener/designer-skills

This just tells Claude where the skills live. Nothing installs yet.

3. Pick what you want. Type /plugin and press enter, then open the Discover tab. You'll see all the collections. Move with the arrow keys, press space to tick the ones you want, and enter to install. That's it.

4. Don't know which skill you need? Type /designer-toolkit:start-here and say what you're working on. It names the stage you're at, gives you one command to run now and the two that follow it, and tells you what you can skip. Use it whenever you're unsure where a piece of work begins.

I only want the design skills, not everything

Same three steps. On the Discover list in step 3, just tick the design ones, design-research, design-systems, ui-design, interaction-design, and so on, and leave the rest. Install as few or as many as you like, and come back for more any time.

I only want one specific collection

Each collection also has its own door. Swap the command in step 2 for the one you want, for example:

/plugin marketplace add Owl-Listener/inclusive-design-skills

Then do step 3 the same way.

Prefer Gemini CLI?

Each plugin is also a Gemini CLI extension. From your project root:

git clone https://github.com/Owl-Listener/designer-skills /tmp/designer-skills
mkdir -p .gemini/extensions
cp -r /tmp/designer-skills/.gemini/extensions/. .gemini/extensions/

The five collections

Collection	Plugins	What it covers
Design practice (this repo)	9	Research, systems, UX strategy, UI, interaction, prototyping & testing, design ops, the designer's toolkit, visual critique.
AI product design	6	Designing agentic experiences: model interaction, alignment reasoning, system behaviour, evaluation, agent orchestration, prompt architecture.
UX program management	6	Running design programs: planning, stakeholder comms, delivery, alignment, measurement, process design.
Design leadership	6	Leading design: people, teams, strategy, org influence, operating cadence, leadership craft.
Inclusive design	6	Accessible by default: cognitive accessibility, inclusive interaction, accessible content, inclusive personas, adaptive interfaces, accessibility decisions.

The other four collections each live in their own repo, with their own stars and full detail, and this marketplace pulls their plugins in for you — so the one install above covers all five. This repo is the front door, and the home of the design-practice collection below.

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Design practice (this repo)

Agentic skills, commands, and plugins for design, from research to systems, UI, interaction, and delivery. 111 skills and 34 commands across 9 plugins.

Plugins

Plugin	Skills	Commands	Description
design-research	14	4	User research, qualitative and quantitative: personas, empathy maps, journey maps, interviews, usability testing, card sorting, surveys, behavioural analytics, and qual-quant triangulation.
design-systems	11	3	Build and maintain design systems: tokens, components, accessibility, theming, motion, governance, and localization.
ux-strategy	12	3	Shape product direction: competitive analysis, design principles, experience mapping, information architecture, content strategy, and service blueprints.
ui-design	19	5	Craft polished interfaces: layout grids, color systems, typography, responsive design, data viz, Gestalt/perceptual principles, and platform conventions.
interaction-design	22	5	Design meaningful interactions: micro-animations, state machines, gestures, feedback, cognitive laws, forms, onboarding, navigation, search, and conversational UX.
prototyping-testing	10	5	Validate designs: prototyping strategies, usability testing, heuristic evaluation, and A/B experiments.
design-ops	9	3	Streamline operations: critique frameworks, handoff specs, sprint planning, team workflows, design debt, and impact reporting.
designer-toolkit	7	4	Essential utilities: design rationale, presentations, case studies, UX writing, system adoption, and design negotiation.
visual-critique	7	2	Visual critique: hierarchy, brand consistency, composition, typography, colour, affordance, and information density.

These nine plugins ship from this repo — none of them has a separate repo, and there is nothing to clone. After adding the marketplace, install one by name:

/plugin install ux-strategy@designer-skills

All commands

Command	Plugin	Description
/design-ops:handoff	design-ops	Run the full handoff workflow — specs, measurements, assets, states, and a QA checklist — and output a developer-ready package.
/design-ops:plan-sprint	design-ops	Run a design sprint end to end — challenge framing, schedule, exercises, and prototype test plan.
/design-ops:setup-workflow	design-ops	Set up a team's operating rhythm end to end — rituals, task flow, tooling, review gates, and version control.
/design-research:discover	design-research	Run a full user research cycle — persona creation, empathy mapping, and journey mapping for a product or feature.
/design-research:interview	design-research	Prepare an interview script or summarize an interview transcript into structured insights.
/design-research:synthesize	design-research	Synthesize research data into affinity diagrams, themes, and actionable insights.
/design-research:test-plan	design-research	Run the full usability study workflow — research questions, participant criteria, tasks, metrics, and facilitation guide.
/design-systems:audit-system	design-systems	Run a comprehensive audit of an existing design system for consistency, completeness, and accessibility.
/design-systems:create-component	design-systems	Scaffold a full component specification end to end — props, states, variants, accessibility, and documentation.
/design-systems:tokenize	design-systems	Extract tokens from an existing design or stylesheet and organise them — naming, structure, and theme mapping.
/designer-toolkit:build-presentation	designer-toolkit	Build a design presentation end to end — audience framing, narrative structure, and supporting rationale.
/designer-toolkit:start-here	designer-toolkit	Find where to start in the collection — name what you're working on and get routed to one command, the two that follow it, and the stages you can skip.
/designer-toolkit:write-case-study	designer-toolkit	Build a portfolio case study end to end — project framing, process narrative, outcomes, and visuals.
/designer-toolkit:write-rationale	designer-toolkit	Write design rationale for a set of decisions, linking each to user needs, business goals, and principles.
/interaction-design:design-form	interaction-design	Design a form end to end — structure, decision points, chunking, validation, errors, and completion.
/interaction-design:design-interaction	interaction-design	Design a complete interaction flow for a feature or component.
/interaction-design:design-onboarding	interaction-design	Design a first-run experience end to end — activation path, progressive disclosure, and time to first value.
/interaction-design:error-flow	interaction-design	Design an error flow end to end — prevention, detection, messaging, and recovery paths.
/interaction-design:map-states	interaction-design	Model a component's states and transitions end to end — states, events, guards, and edge cases.
/prototyping-testing:evaluate	prototyping-testing	Run a heuristic evaluation end to end — expert review against heuristics with severity ratings and recommended fixes.
/prototyping-testing:experiment	prototyping-testing	Design an A/B experiment end to end — hypothesis, variants, primary metric, and sample size.
/prototyping-testing:explore-options	prototyping-testing	Run a parallel exploration end to end — frame the decision, build a spread of behaviourally distinct concepts, pressure-test each, and converge with a decision record.
/prototyping-testing:prototype-plan	prototyping-testing	Create a prototyping and testing plan for a design initiative.
/prototyping-testing:test-plan	prototyping-testing	Choose a testing method and build the plan around it — method selection, task scenarios, click tests, and accessibility coverage.
/ui-design:color-palette	ui-design	Run the full colour workflow — tonal scales, semantic mapping, contrast checks, dark mode, and chart colours — and output a documented palette.
/ui-design:design-screen	ui-design	Design a complete screen layout from a description or requirements.
/ui-design:platform-audit	ui-design	Audit a design for iOS and Android convention compliance — navigation, controls, typography, and platform-specific gaps.
/ui-design:responsive-audit	ui-design	Audit a design's responsive behaviour across breakpoints — layout, touch targets, and content reflow.
/ui-design:type-system	ui-design	Build a typography system end to end — scale, weights, line heights, measure, and responsive behaviour.
/ux-strategy:benchmark	ux-strategy	Run a competitive benchmark across a set of products — pattern comparison, gap analysis, and opportunity callouts.
/ux-strategy:frame-problem	ux-strategy	Structure an ambiguous design challenge into a clear problem definition with constraints and criteria.
/ux-strategy:strategize	ux-strategy	Develop a complete UX strategy for a product or feature area.
/visual-critique:critique-screen	visual-critique	Run all seven visual critiques on a screen and output a prioritised fix list.
/visual-critique:critique-ux	visual-critique	Run a focused UX critique on a screen — affordances, information density, and hierarchy — and output a prioritised fix list.

What are skills and commands?

Skills are domain knowledge units — nouns. They teach Claude about a design topic: how to create a user persona, how to define design tokens, how to write a non-leading interview question.

Commands are workflows — verbs. They chain skills together to do a complete job: /design-research:discover runs personas, empathy map, and journey map in one go.

You'll mostly reach for commands. The skills run underneath them.

Pick your starting point

I'm starting a new product from scratch

Start with research, even if you think you know the users.

/design-research:discover