Best Claude Code Skills for UI Design (2026, Tested)

We gave four popular Claude Code design skills the same job: redesign one existing landing page. Only Impeccable changed how the page looked. taste-skill, Jakub Krehel's better-ui and Emil Kowalski's skills polished details at best, and left the design itself where it was.

That matches what their makers say: skills encode rules and polish, not taste. If you're not a designer, a skill won't make you one.

Our picks:

• One skill: install Impeccable.
• Polish and motion: add better-ui or Emil Kowalski's skills on top.
• To actually move the design away from the generic AI look: give Claude a few curated references. Subframe's free inspiration MCP is the one-click way to get them (we make it). Otherwise, curate a handful yourself.

The skills at a glance

• Impeccable: the broadest skill, covering direction, critique and polish. The only one that changed the look in our test.
• taste-skill: art direction for sites and app screens, built from a study of curated sites, with its own browser checks.
• better-ui: exact polish values for radius, shadows, icons and motion.
• Emil Kowalski's skills: motion and interaction polish from a Linear design engineer.
• Anthropic's frontend-design: the official default most people start with.

Skill	Maker	What it's for	Changed the look in our test?	License	GitHub stars (Oct 23, 2026)
Impeccable	Paul Bakaus	Direction, critique and polish; 60 slop checks	Yes	Apache-2.0	85,545
taste-skill	Leon Lin	Art direction from curated sites, plus real images and browser checks	No, polish only	MIT	101,627
better-ui	Jakub Krehel	Polish values: radius, shadows, icons, motion	No, polish only	MIT	8,206 (jakubkrehel/skills)
Emil Kowalski's skills	Emil Kowalski	Motion and interaction	No, polish only	MIT	49,077
frontend-design	Anthropic	Aesthetic direction; the official baseline	Not tested	Apache 2.0	183,301 (anthropics/skills)

All five are free and open source.

How we tested

We used each skill on the same existing landing page, with the same prompt: "Please use the [skill] skills to redesign / improve the existing landing page." Then we compared the result with the original.

We used the latest version of each skill as of October 2026, including taste-skill v2. We didn't run Anthropic's frontend-design in this test, so we describe it without claiming results.

Alongside the test, we read each skill's own instructions (its SKILL.md), its repo and site, and what people say about it in 1,002 Reddit threads we coded from July to October 2026.

1. Impeccable

What it is: a single skill with 24 commands, made by Paul Bakaus, creator of jQuery UI (impeccable.style). Among them:

• shape, critique and audit
• polish, bolder, quieter and distill
• animate, typeset and layout

It also runs 60 deterministic checks for common AI tells, without an LLM. It treats marketing pages and app UI differently.

In our test: the only skill that made visible changes to the design, not just the details.

Where it's strong:

• The widest scope of the four.
• Its catalog of slop patterns is widely shared on Reddit as a go-to list of AI tells.
• It's the skill people recommend most there: we found it in 78 of 511 substantive threads, often as the top answer.

Where it falls short:

• Critics say sites built with it still look like the same kind of site.
• Some find it too opinionated for an established app.
• Its maker frames it as a way to catch flaws and amplify your intent, not to supply taste.

Install: npx impeccable install. It also works in Cursor, Codex, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot and others.

2. taste-skill

What it is: "the anti-slop frontend framework for AI agents," by Leon Lin (tasteskill.dev). Version 2, released in October 2026, is a different skill from the original. It:

• deals three art directions per build, drawn from 20 researched directions based on a study of 247 curated sites
• builds with real, credited images from open archives
• checks the page in a real browser at three widths, then revises the top problems over up to three rounds

It started with landing pages and websites. Version 2.1 added dashboards and app screens.

In our test: some polish, no visible change to the design.

Where it's strong:

• The most thorough process of the four, and the only one that brings its own curated directions.
• Popular with people who want a strong default.
• In our Reddit corpus it usually comes up alongside Impeccable (14 of 16 threads that name it).

Where it falls short:

• It's slow: a typical build takes 30–45 minutes and a few hundred thousand tokens, and it needs Node 22 and Chrome.
• Its curated directions are the same library for everyone who installs it, so they're a shared default rather than your own taste.
• Its own blind test is telling: in the final round, judged by a model on an Awwwards-style rubric, the new version scored 7.7 and no skill at all scored 7.8 (taste-skill changelog). Its clear win was on its own slop inspector.

Still, the direction is worth noticing: the most popular anti-slop skill rebuilt itself around curated references.

Install: in Claude Code, /plugin marketplace add Leonxlnx/taste-skill, then /plugin install taste-skill@taste-skill. Elsewhere: npx skills add https://github.com/Leonxlnx/taste-skill --skill "design-taste-frontend".

3. better-ui (Jakub Krehel)

What it is: one of 14 skills in jakubkrehel/skills by Jakub Krehel, a design engineer who runs the interfaces.dev magazine. better-ui "polishes the surfaces, icons and motion" with exact values:

• the outer radius equals the inner radius plus padding
• layered shadows instead of borders for depth
• a 0.96 scale on press
• icon strokes matched to text weight

It reports findings in a table, with a verdict to block or approve.

In our test: some polish, no visible change to the design.

Where it's strong: exact, checkable rules for details most people don't know to fix.

Where it falls short:

• By design, it doesn't set direction. It applies "once the underlying interaction is sound" and keeps your existing style.
• The set's coordinating skill describes its approach as "Evidence, not taste."
• It's newer, and we found no community discussion of it yet.

Install: npx skills add jakubkrehel/skills

4. Emil Kowalski's skills

What it is: 15 skills from emilkowalski/skills by Emil Kowalski, a design engineer at Linear and the creator of Sonner and Vaul. The main one, emil-design-eng, is "mostly animation, but also some design advice":

• when to animate, easing and duration
• springs, gestures and reduced motion
• component rules such as never scaling from 0

In our test: some polish, no visible change to the design.

Where it's strong: the best guidance on motion of any skill here. The others include animation reviews and a skill for picking a UI library.

Where it falls short:

• It's animation and interaction polish, not layout or direction.
• One designer on Reddit taught Claude several skills including Emil's, and said the result "still fell flat."
• Kowalski himself writes that agents "don't have great taste" and that the creative part is still up to you (Agents with Taste).

Install: npx skills@latest add emilkowalski/skills

Baseline: Anthropic's frontend-design

What it is: Anthropic's official skill (SKILL.md). It tells Claude to:

• commit to a distinct aesthetic direction
• ground it in the subject's world
• plan a compact palette and type system before building

It lists five looks that AI design clusters around, including the cream, serif and terracotta one, and tells Claude not to default to them. It never asks you for a reference.

Why it's here: it's the skill ChatGPT recommends on these questions, and the one most people install first. One independent roundup calls it "the floor, not the ceiling" (Composio); critics on Reddit say it pulls everything toward Anthropic's own look.

Install: /plugin install frontend-design@claude-plugins-official

Why design skills plateau

Skills are rules, not taste. Every skill here tells Claude what to avoid and which values to use. None of them tells Claude what your product should look like. Without that, the model still designs from the average of what it was trained on: the most common layouts, fonts and colors on the web. Anthropic calls this "distributional convergence" (Anthropic).

Each skill has its own look. On Reddit, people say every popular anti-slop skill ends up with a recognizable style of its own, because everyone uses the same ones. Banning one default moves you to the next.

Stacking them fights itself. Even the two polish skills disagree on small values: better-ui sets a 0.96 scale on press, Emil Kowalski's sets 0.97. Reddit's advice is to turn skills off and compare against no skill at all.

The makers say it too. Bakaus says taste can't be mass-produced. Kowalski says the creative part is up to you. Krehel's set calls itself "evidence, not taste."

What actually moves the design: curated references

What changed our results most wasn't another skill. It was giving Claude a few strong references, curated by someone with taste.

The usual references aren't enough. Pointing Claude at Mobbin didn't fix it in our testing: inspiration galleries are the average of the web too, which is what the model already knows. A small set picked by designers made the difference. The most upvoted workflow in our Reddit study works the same way: copy a strong reference's layout first, then run a skill.

Two ways to do it:

• Curate it yourself. Pick three to five sites with a clear point of view. Write down what you like about each, and give Claude the URLs or screenshots.
• Use Subframe's inspiration MCP. It's free, and it's ours. It gives Claude Code, Cursor or Codex a library of real sites hand-picked by designers. The agent looks at their layout, type and color, then designs something new for your project.
  • Setup: run claude mcp add --transport http subframe https://mcp.subframe.com/mcp, sign in with /mcp, then ask: "Find inspiration on Subframe, then design a landing page for my project."
  • Scope: today it covers landing pages, marketing sites and portfolios.

Then keep a skill for what skills do well: Impeccable for critique, better-ui or Emil Kowalski's skills for polish and motion.

Which should you choose?

• You want one skill: Impeccable.
• Your design is fine, but the details feel cheap: better-ui.
• Your UI feels static or the motion is off: Emil Kowalski's skills.
• You want a full art-direction process and don't mind a long run: taste-skill.
• You want the official baseline: frontend-design.
• Your app still looks AI-made after all of that: add curated references.

FAQ

Which Claude Code skill should I install first for UI design?

Impeccable, if you want one. It was the only skill in our test that changed the design itself, and it's the most recommended on Reddit. Anthropic's frontend-design is the official default and a reasonable free baseline.

Should I stack design skills?

Usually not. Skills overlap and contradict each other, down to small values like the scale on a button press. Pick one direction skill, add a polish skill if you need it, and compare against a run with no skill.

Is Anthropic's frontend-design skill enough?

It's a good floor, but it never asks for a reference, and critics say it pulls output toward Anthropic's own look. Pair it with a few curated references.

Do these skills work in Cursor and Codex?

Mostly yes. Impeccable and taste-skill list Cursor, Codex, Gemini CLI and others. jakubkrehel/skills ships Codex and OpenCode setups. Emil Kowalski's repo installs through the skills CLI.

Will a design skill make my app look professional if I'm not a designer?

Not on its own. Skills remove known AI tells and tighten details, but they don't choose a direction for you. Curated references do that part.

Get curated references free

Skills polish; references decide what the page looks like. Get Subframe's inspiration MCP free, or try Subframe, where the AI uses curated inspiration automatically when a design needs it and follows your design system when it doesn't.