The 10 Claude skills every designer should install.
Verified this week. Real download links. Per-skill use cases for UX, service, visual, and design ops.
Most of what designers do with AI in 2026 is one-off. Open Claude, paste in a transcript, ask for a summary. Open Claude again the next day, paste in another transcript, ask for the same summary. We've made the AI repeat itself instead of teaching it once.
Claude skills are the fix. A skill is a small folder of instructions Claude loads when it recognises the task. You install it once. It triggers on every related request after that. The format is open. The install is a single command. And the public library has gotten serious in the last six months.
Below are the ten skills I install on every workstation. All publicly available. All verified the week of publish. Real install paths for each. The article is biased toward what UX, service, visual, and design-leadership work actually needs.
Stop building one-off AI workflows. Install a skill and reuse the work.
Three things to know
1. Skills are an open standard. Anthropic released the Skill format in October 2025 and open-sourced the spec in December 2025. It's now supported by Claude.ai, Claude Code, the Claude API, Cursor, Codex, Gemini CLI, Antigravity, and Windsurf.[1] Skills you install in one product travel to the others.
2. Install paths vary by product. Claude.ai uses upload-as-zip in Settings. Claude Code uses a plugin marketplace command. The API uses Console upload. The manual fallback is dropping the folder into ~/.claude/skills/. The cheat-sheet at the bottom of this article covers all four.
3. The four Anthropic document skills are on by default in paid Claude.ai. docx, pdf, pptx, xlsx. You already have them. The rest in this list need installing.
The ten
docx
Read, edit, and generate Microsoft Word documents including styles, tables, images, footnotes, tracked changes, and a table of contents.
Why a designer would use it. Convert a research synthesis into a branded Word report with tracked-changes for stakeholder review. Auto-produce a service spec with TOC and headings ready for a client. Stop fighting Pages.
On by default on paid Claude.ai.
In Claude Code: /plugin marketplace add anthropics/skills
/plugin install document-skills@anthropic-agent-skills
pptx
Create, edit, and extract content from PowerPoint decks with built-in visual QA (renders slides to images and checks for overlap, low contrast, leftover placeholders).
Why a designer would use it. Turn a written workshop debrief into a presentable deck. Lay out a service-blueprint walkthrough. Convert a Miro export into a stakeholder deck without the formatting tax.
Same as docx (document-skills plugin or default on Claude.ai).
Triggers on "deck", "slides", "presentation", or any .pptx reference.
xlsx
Create, read, and edit spreadsheets including formulas, formatting, charts, and bulk data cleaning.
Why a designer would use it. UX research analysis. Import a messy CSV of survey responses, clean it, add coding columns, output a pivot of themes by segment. Also useful for design-ops dashboards and audit scoring matrices.
Same as docx. On by default on paid Claude.ai.
Read, extract, merge, split, watermark, fill forms, and OCR PDFs.
Why a designer would use it. Pull verbatims out of a 60-page interview transcript. OCR a scanned heuristic eval. Merge a portfolio case study into a single PDF for a client. Essential utility belt.
Same as docx. On by default on paid Claude.ai.
brand-guidelines
Applies a specified brand palette and typography to artefacts so every output looks on-brand.
Why a designer would use it. Fork this skill, swap in your studio's tokens, and every deck, doc, and PDF Claude produces auto-styles to your brand. No more "make it match our deck" round-trips.
Claude Code: /plugin install example-skills@anthropic-agent-skills
Or copy folder to ~/.claude/skills/
Heads up. The default values are Anthropic's brand. Fork and replace before relying on it, otherwise everything comes out in Anthropic orange.
canvas-design
Generates poster-quality static visuals (PNG and PDF) by first writing a design philosophy, then expressing it visually.
Why a designer would use it. Concepting moodboards. Workshop posters. Conference talk title cards. Internal manifesto art. The two-step approach (write the intent first, render second) is a strong pattern for using AI as a collaborator instead of a template machine.
example-skills plugin (same as brand-guidelines).
This is the skill that explicitly avoids "AI slop." It produces design with intent, not generic gradients.
theme-factory
Ten preset palette and typography themes (and on-the-fly custom theme generation) that can be applied to any artefact: slides, docs, HTML.
Why a designer would use it. Fast "what would this look like in five different visual identities?" exploration. Useful for early-stage brand work and pitch decks where you want quick variation to talk about.
example-skills plugin.
doc-coauthoring
Three-stage workflow (Context Gathering → Refinement & Structure → Reader Testing) for co-writing PRDs, decision docs, design specs, and RFCs.
Why a designer would use it. Design leaders writing OKRs, strategies, or hiring memos. The Reader Testing stage runs a fresh Claude over your doc to surface ambiguity. It's basically usability-testing a document.
example-skills plugin.
Triggers on "write a doc", "draft a proposal", "design spec", "PRD", "decision doc".
frontend-design
Builds production-grade frontend components and pages with a deliberately non-generic aesthetic point of view. Avoids Inter, purple gradients, and overused patterns.
Why a designer would use it. Build a working prototype microsite for a service concept. Spin up an interactive case study page. Generate a working portfolio component. The opinionated anti-slop guidance is the differentiator if you're used to Figma-quality output.
example-skills plugin.
brand-build-skills (RampStack)
A 99-skill library spanning brand, design, content, SEO, dev, ops, growth, and UX research. Every skill follows the same structure and they're designed to compose.
Why a designer would use it. The highest-leverage skills inside for designers are ux-research, usability-testing, journey-mapping, jtbd-framing, design-system, design-standards, art-direction, creative-direction, creative-brief, brand-identity, brand-style-guide, logo-design, information-architecture, accessibility-audit, discovery-research-synthesis, okr-design, experiment-design, and skill-creation-walkthrough. Almost everything a design team produces is covered.
Claude.ai: upload individual skill folders as .zip under Settings → Capabilities → Skills.
Claude Code: mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && cp -r skills/* ~/.claude/skills/
The single biggest public design-relevant skill library on the internet right now. Worth a working evening to skim.
Where to install, depending on what you use
Four paths cover every product Claude skills run on today. Pick the one that matches your tool, paste the command, you're done.
Claude Code · marketplace
/plugin marketplace add <org>/<repo>
/plugin install <plugin-id>@<marketplace-id>
Used by Anthropic and most public skill repositories. The most reliable install path.
Claude.ai · upload
Settings → Capabilities → Skills → upload .zip
Auto-loads when the description matches the request. Paid plans only.
Claude API · Console
client.messages.create(
..., skills=[...]
)
Upload through the Anthropic Console, then reference the skill by ID.
Manual · folder copy
~/.claude/skills/
.claude/skills/ (project)
Drop the skill folder for user-level or project-level install. Works in Claude Code immediately.
Worth a look, didn't make the top 10
These almost made the cut. Skim them; some might fit your stack better than the ones I picked.
slack-gif-creator(Anthropic). Custom Slack emoji for design culture. Narrow but fun. GitHub →algorithmic-art(Anthropic). Seeded p5.js generative art for hero imagery and banners. GitHub →web-artifacts-builder(Anthropic). Multi-component React artefacts. Powerful, but most designers want Figma-to-code or a hosted prototype. GitHub →internal-comms(Anthropic). Status updates and leadership comms. Overlaps with doc-coauthoring. GitHub →skill-creator(Anthropic). The meta-skill for building, testing, and iterating your own skills with evals. Use this once you've seen the others in action. GitHub →- Skill Seekers by yusufkaraaslan. Converts any documentation site or GitHub repo into a Claude skill automatically. GitHub →
- awesome-claude-skills by Composio. Not a skill itself: an index of 1,000+ community skills. Where to keep browsing after this list. GitHub →
The next move, write your own
The skills above are a starting kit. The real leverage is when you write a skill that encodes your studio's process.
I've written four so far (gravitas-css, d3-conversion-audit, jtbd-icp-generator, heuristic-evaluation). Each one took an afternoon. Each one saves me a week per engagement. The template is the same as the public skills: a SKILL.md file describing what the skill does and when it triggers, plus any supporting reference files.
If you want the case study on how I built mine, the Saudi banking audit piece walks through the workflow end to end: I stopped writing UX audits. I built a Claude skill instead.
References
- Anthropic. "Claude Skills: an open standard." Spec published October 2025, open-sourced December 2025. agentskills.io
- Anthropic Skills Repository. github.com/anthropics/skills
- RampStack Co. "99-skill library for Claude." github.com/rampstackco/claude-skills
- ComposioHQ. "Awesome Claude Skills." github.com/ComposioHQ/awesome-claude-skills
Have a skill I should know about?
This list will be updated quarterly. If you've built or discovered a skill that belongs here, send it over.
Email me your pick →