Open Design: Open Source Claude Design With a GUI
Open Design: Open Source Claude Design With a GUI
Open Design is the second open source clone of Claude Design to hit GitHub this month, and the first one with an actual graphic interface. It's built on top of Huashu Design, works with Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, or your own API key, and ships with 31 skills and 72 design systems out of the box. The catch: it's a week old, it's slower than Claude Design, and a few pieces are still on the roadmap. Here's how it actually performs and where it fits in your stack.
If you've been hammered by Claude Design's usage limits, this is the most polished workaround so far.
What Is Open Design?
Open Design is an open source design tool that mimics Anthropic's Claude Design product, but with no usage caps and a portable agent layer. You can plug it into Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, OpenCode, or any harness via API key. It auto-detects which coding agents are already on your machine and routes work to them — so the model bill stays on your existing Max account or whatever subscription you're already running.
The project is openly a conglomeration of four other projects:
- Huashu Design — the terminal-only Claude Design clone covered earlier this week
- Guang PowerPoint skill — slide deck generation
- Open Code Design — the agent layer
- Multica — packaging
In practice, Open Design is Huashu Design with a polished graphic layer on top. That framing matters because Huashu Design was already a good tool. Open Design just makes it accessible to people who don't want to live in the terminal.
Why Does Open Design Matter?
Claude Design itself is a great product. The output is solid, the design systems are sharp, and the workflow is tight. The problem is usage. Claude Design eats through your Anthropic limits fast, and unless you're on the highest tier, you'll hit the wall in the middle of a project regularly.
Open source clones solve that by routing the work through your existing coding agent's allowance. If you're already running Claude Code on a Max account, you've got headroom you're not using. Open Design redirects design work into that lane.
The more these clones ship, the harder Anthropic gets pushed to fix the usage problem. I want ten of these tools to ship next month. That's the leverage.
How Does Open Design Compare to Claude Design Side by Side?
Visually, the two tools are nearly identical. Same canvas layout. Same Q&A brief on the left. Same prototype-and-iterate flow.
The meaningful differences:
- Open Design supports media providers. You can plug in Minimax, OpenAI, ElevenLabs, and others to generate images and video directly from the UI. Claude Design doesn't do this.
- Open Design is agent-agnostic. Claude Design only runs on Anthropic. Open Design lets you point at Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, or OpenCode — whichever you're paying for.
- Open Design is slower. A landing page that took Claude Design about 5 minutes took Open Design about 10 minutes in my testing.
- Some Claude Design features aren't shipped yet. The comment, edit, and draw tools show up in the UI but don't actually work. They're on the roadmap.
- Tweaks panel needs a manual prompt. In Claude Design the tweaks panel pops up automatically. In Open Design you have to prompt the agent: create a tweaks panel where I can adjust things on the fly.
For a tool that came out this week, that gap is reasonable.
How Do You Install Open Design?
Two install paths.
Path one — manual: open the repo, copy the install commands from the README, and paste them into your terminal.
Path two — let your agent do it: copy the install link from the repo, open Claude Code or Codex, and tell it: install this for me in a new directory. The agent reads the link and handles the rest. This is the path I'd recommend.
Once it's installed, ask Claude Code to spin up the dev server. You'll get a local URL and a setup screen.
On that setup screen, you'll see a model picker. Choose local CLI — that's the option that pulls from Claude Code or Codex on your machine instead of charging API fees. Set the model to default (which uses the CLI's config) and you're done.
If you want image and video generation, add a media provider. The UI accepts API keys for Minimax, OpenAI, ElevenLabs, and a handful of others. This is one of the genuine value-adds over Claude Design.
What Does the Open Design UI Actually Include?
Five top-level tabs: designs, examples, design systems, image templates, video templates.
Not all of them earn their keep:
- Designs — where you create prototypes and slide decks. This is the main reason to use the tool.
- Examples — pre-built demos. Useful as inspiration, but be honest about what they are: single-line prompt outputs. Don't get blown away by a flashy example and assume there's some clever prompt engineering behind it. There isn't.
- Design systems — the closest analog is
awesome-designs.md. Each system breaks a real website (Airbnb, etc.) into palette, typography, components, visual theme, and atmosphere. The idea is you reuse these as a style anchor when generating new work. Mileage varies. - Image templates — bloat. Skip it.
- Video templates — also bloat. Skip it.
The meat is in the designs tab. Everything else is window dressing.
How Do You Build a Prototype in Open Design?
Same loop as Claude Design.
- Name the demo
- Choose one or more design systems (or skip)
- Pick wireframe or high-fidelity
- Optionally import a Claude Design zip
- Hit create
For my test, I gave it the same prompt I used against Huashu Design earlier this week:
Create a landing page for a fake SaaS product called Lighthouse, built for small teams and solo founders. Give me three different examples I can compare side by side.
Open Design returned three landing pages — a stacked classic, an editorial layout, and a louder, more in-your-face version. Compared to what Claude Design produced for the same prompt, the fonts, color palettes, and overall direction were close cousins. Same vibe, same quality bar.
The Q&A brief on the left ran nearly identically to Claude Design's: ask clarifying questions, offer button-style answer choices, lock in the direction before generating.
The output quality matches Claude Design. The speed doesn't.
How Do You Use Your Own Design System?
This is one of the rougher parts of Open Design.
There's no UI button to create a custom design system. You can't point Open Design at a folder of brand assets and have it ingest them. The only supported path runs through Claude Design first.
The workflow:
- Build the design system in Claude Design itself
- Open the design system, click Share → Download project as .zip
- Inside Open Design, select that zip when creating a new prototype
- Open Design unpacks the design files and uses them as the style anchor
This is where Huashu Design has an edge. Because Huashu Design lives in the terminal, you can just point it at a directory: take a look at this folder, recreate the slide deck in this style. The terminal gives you direct filesystem access. The GUI doesn't.
If your design system isn't already in Claude Design and you don't want the round-trip, Huashu Design is the better tool for that specific job.
What Does a Real Slide Deck Look Like Out of Open Design?
I ran a second test: a slide deck for the same Lighthouse SaaS product, using my Agentic OS dashboard design system as the visual anchor.
I fed it through the Q&A brief:
- Audience: product launch internal
- Room: product folks
- Slide count: short
- Fidelity: high
- Speaker notes: no
- Visual tone: brutalist
- Design system: Agentic OS (imported as a Claude Design zip)
Open Design built a to-do list, worked through it, and shipped the deck. The first slide came back on-brand with the Agentic OS aesthetic — dark, terracotta accents, the vibe held.
One hiccup: the slide-to-slide nav broke on the first generation. I could only see slide one. Pasted the bug back into the Open Design chat and it patched the issue.
I exported the final deck to PowerPoint to stress-test the export pipeline. Out of seven slides, four were clean, two needed minor spacing fixes, and one had numbering layout issues. Call it a 90% solution. About five minutes of manual cleanup.
That's roughly the same fix-up tax you'd expect from Claude Design. The export bridge isn't the problem — the underlying generation is just rough enough that you'll always touch it up before shipping.
Should You Use Open Design or Huashu Design?
Depends on whether you need the GUI.
- Use Open Design if you want a visual canvas, you're getting crushed by Claude Design's usage limits, and you don't want to live in a terminal
- Use Huashu Design if you're comfortable in the terminal and want speed plus flexibility — pointing at folders, iterating fast, no UI overhead
Huashu Design is faster and more flexible. Open Design is more accessible.
If you're a developer who already lives in Claude Code or Codex, Huashu Design is probably the right pick. If you're a designer or PM who wants the canvas-style experience without the Anthropic usage tax, Open Design is the cleaner choice.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Open Design free?
Yes — the tool itself is open source and free to install. Your only costs are whatever coding agent you point it at (Claude Code, Codex, etc.) and any media providers you optionally connect for image and video generation. If you're already paying for a Max account, you're not adding net-new spend.
Does Open Design work without Claude Code?
Yes — it's agent-agnostic. It auto-detects whichever coding agents are on your machine. You can use Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, OpenCode, or skip the local CLI entirely and bring your own API key. This is the main upgrade over Claude Design, which only runs on Anthropic.
How is Open Design different from Huashu Design?
Open Design is Huashu Design plus a graphic interface. The repo openly says so. Huashu Design is terminal-only and faster. Open Design adds the visual canvas, design system management UI, and image/video template tabs on top. If you don't need the GUI, Huashu Design is more flexible because the terminal lets you point directly at directories.
Can Open Design import my existing Claude Design work?
Yes, via .zip export. Open the design system in Claude Design, click Share, choose Download project as .zip, then upload that zip into Open Design when creating a new prototype. This is currently the only supported way to use a custom design system inside Open Design — there's no native UI for building one from scratch.
Is Open Design ready for client work?
For prototypes and pitch decks, yes — with five minutes of polish. The output matches Claude Design's quality but the speed is slower (10 minutes vs 5) and the export to PowerPoint will need some manual spacing fixes. For high-fidelity production work where every pixel matters, you'll still want a designer in the loop. For early-stage exploration and client review rounds, it's solid.
If you want to go deeper into Claude Code and design tooling, join the free Chase AI community for templates, prompts, and live breakdowns. And if you're serious about building with AI, check out the paid community, Chase AI+, for hands-on guidance on how to make money with AI.
