Distinctive UI Without a Mockup
For when there is no Figma file — just a brief. Left alone, an agent builds the same page every time: centred hero, three feature cards, purple gradient. This workflow puts a reference step in front of the build. Inspo's MCP server returns a moodboard of real, shipped pages for the brief — palettes, fonts, a DESIGN.md for each. Taste Skill turns the brief and those references into a stated design direction before any code. Emil Kowalski's design-engineering skill reviews the result for the details that make an interface feel finished, and his Animate skill decides which interactions should move at all, and how.
Skills
Taste Skill
Reads the brief, writes a one-line design read, and sets the direction before code — asks one question rather than guessing when the brief is ambiguous.
npx skills add Leonxlnx/taste-skill@design-taste-frontendEmil Design Engineering
Reviews the built interface for the details that compound: responsive buttons, origin-aware popovers, interruptible transitions.
npx skills add emilkowalski/skills@emil-design-engAnimate
Decides whether something should animate at all, then its purpose, tool, easing or spring, interruption, and reduced-motion handling — in that order.
npx skills add emilkowalski/skills@animateSetup
Three skills: one for direction, one for polish, one for motion. Install them in the project you are building.
npx skills add Leonxlnx/taste-skill@design-taste-frontend
npx skills add emilkowalski/skills@emil-design-eng
npx skills add emilkowalski/skills@animateAdd Inspo's hosted MCP server. It is free, read-only and needs no key. The screenshots it returns are of third-party sites — use them as reference, not as assets to ship.
claude mcp add --transport http inspo https://inspomcp.dev/api/mcpGive the agent the brief and ask it to call Inspo's recommend tool first and summarise what the exemplars share — type, palette, layout — before writing any code. That summary is what Taste Skill's design read should build on.
Let Taste Skill build the page. Then ask for a design-engineering review of what was built, and use Animate for any interaction you want to move — including the ones it tells you not to animate.
Use Cases
- Landing pages and portfolios from a written brief
- Redesigning a page that looks AI-generated
- Adding motion to an existing interface without overdoing it
- Choosing a type and colour direction from real references
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