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If everything you build with AI still looks like AI, this is for you. These are the five design skills I recommend everyone start with. Add any of them and your designs instantly look more intentional.
Here is the thing nobody says out loud. AI does not come with taste. It learned design from the entire internet, the beautiful and the boring, so when you ask it to build something it reaches for the safe average. That safe average is why so much AI output looks the same. Same fonts, same layouts, same slightly off vibe.
A design skill fixes that at the source. A skill is a small package of instructions you add to Claude once, and it raises the baseline taste Claude designs from. Instead of guessing, Claude now works from real design rules, real color palettes, and real reference. The prompt you type barely changes. The result changes a lot.
These are the five I would start with. Each one has a job, and I gave each a single word so you remember what it does. Add one and your work looks more intentional right away. Add two and people start asking who designed it.
Skill 1Frontend Design
Professional. This is Anthropic's own official skill, built by the team behind Claude, so it is about as trustworthy as a skill gets. It teaches Claude what a real front end should look like and how it should behave, so the output stops feeling like a rough draft and starts feeling like something you would actually ship. If you install only one thing off this whole list, make it this. It is the best default first step, and everything else stacks nicely on top of it.
Skill 2UI/UX Pro Max
Cohesive. This one hands Claude a searchable design database instead of leaving it to guess. Inside are more than 50 UI styles, around 97 color palettes, 57 font pairings, 99 UX guidelines, and 25 chart types, spread across a few tech stacks. So Claude designs from a real reference, and the screens in your project match each other instead of drifting apart. Reach for it when a project has a lot of pages and you want them to feel like one product, not five.
Skill 3Taste
Original. Taste is the flagship of the anti-slop movement, and it is a community favorite (design engineer Emil Kowalski sponsors it). It lets you tune the style with parameters and variants, like an equalizer for design. Slide things up or down until it feels right. That is how your output stops looking like every other AI site and starts looking like yours. Reach for it the second something feels generic and you cannot quite say why.
Skill 4Impeccable
Polished. Impeccable installs a shared design vocabulary, so you can steer Claude with one word instead of a paragraph. Commands like polish, audit, critique, distill, animate, bolder, and quieter. You stop writing long descriptions and start giving quick direction, the way you would talk to a designer who already gets your taste. Reach for it when you can tell something is off but you hate having to explain exactly what.
Skill 5Emil Kowalski's Skills
Premium. Emil Kowalski is a well-known design engineer, and his skills add the motion layer: animations, page transitions, and the little micro-interactions you feel more than you notice. That motion is the polish that separates a professional interface from an amateur one. Reach for these last, once your layout is right and you want the whole thing to feel expensive. It is the finishing coat, not the foundation.
How ToHow To Install Them
Good news. Adding a skill to Claude is quick, and it works the same way for all five.
- Find the skill. Each one lives in its own repo or in a skills directory. Grab the link to it.
- Add it to Claude. Skills go through Claude's skills system. You can drop the skill into your skills folder, or install it straight from its repo with the skills CLI, something like npx skills add
. - Let Claude use it. Once a skill is added, Claude reaches for it on its own when the work calls for it. You do not have to name it every time.
I put all five in one place, with the exact install steps for each, so you are not hunting around. Comment POLISH on the video and I will send it straight to you.
Where The Magic Is
Stacking beats picking just one. A single skill helps, but two together is where it really clicks. Try Frontend Design for clean structure plus Taste for originality, and you get work that is both solid and clearly yours. Start with one, add a second once you feel the difference, and go from there.