Taste Skill, Emil Kowalski's skills, awesome-design-md: which design add-on does what

Three design names are rising in agent-skill searches this week: Taste Skill, Emil Kowalski's skills and awesome-design-md. They solve different problems. Taste Skill pushes an agent away from template-looking layouts, Emil Kowalski's set is mostly about motion and interaction detail, and awesome-design-md is not a skill at all — it is a library of DESIGN.md files that describe a look for the agent to copy.

The demand signal

We checked Google Trends on 6 October 2026 (about 08:55 Asia/Riyadh), worldwide, past 7 days, seed query claude skills:

Ponytail and Graphify were rising in the same list; we covered them yesterday. On X, a recent-post count for these four names returned 138 posts over the past seven days — a small, steady conversation, not a spike. Trends values are relative, not search counts.

At a glance

Stars show attention, not safety or quality. File sizes are from the GitHub API on 6 October; a large skill uses more of the agent's context each time it loads.

Taste Skill: pick the variant before you install

• The default is v2 and marked experimental. The README calls design-taste-frontend a "substantial rewrite" that reads the brief, infers a design language and tunes three 1–10 dials: DESIGN_VARIANCE, MOTION_INTENSITY and VISUAL_DENSITY.
• Pin v1 if you depended on it: --skill "design-taste-frontend-v1". Re-running the default install replaces v1 in place.
• For an existing site, use the redesign variant (redesign-existing-projects), which audits the UI first. Other variants set a direction you have already chosen: minimalist-ui, industrial-brutalist-ui, high-end-visual-design, and a stricter gpt-taste for GPT/Codex.
• Some skills output images, not code (imagegen-frontend-web, imagegen-frontend-mobile, brandkit).
• The repository folder names differ from install names. Pass the install name to --skill, as the README says.
• Two different things are called "taste". Google's Stitch skills include taste-design, which is already on Skill Rank. It generates anti-generic DESIGN.md files for Google Stitch and lists Stitch's MCP tools in its allowed-tools, so it is not a drop-in for Taste Skill. If you searched "taste skill", check which one a tutorial means.
• The README carries sponsor sections and a note that the project has no official token or coin.

Emil Kowalski's skills: motion first

• `emil-design-eng` is the main skill; the README says it is "mostly animation, but also some design advice." Others in the repo include animate, review-animations, improve-animations, find-animation-opportunities, pick-ui-library, prototype, mobile-native and break-ui (stress-testing a UI with long names, empty lists and huge counts).
• The README's install command adds the whole set. The npx skills CLI accepts --skill to pick one, as Taste Skill's README shows, if you want only emil-design-eng.
• Expect a fixed opening line and table-format reviews. The SKILL.md tells the agent, when invoked without a question, to reply with a single ready message, and to present UI reviews as a Before/After markdown table.

awesome-design-md: a style file, not instructions

• `DESIGN.md` is a Google Stitch idea: a plain-text design-system document that agents read to generate consistent UI. The README pairs it with AGENTS.md: one says how to build, the other how it should look.
• Each folder is "inspired by" a brand's public site — Claude, Linear, Stripe, Vercel and dozens more. Use one as a starting palette and type scale, then make it yours. Shipping a product that imitates another company's brand is a different matter from borrowing a spacing scale.
• Some folders now point elsewhere. The claude folder's README says details moved to getdesign.md, while the DESIGN.md file itself is still in the repository.
• Skill Rank already lists Google's own design-md skill, which analyses Stitch projects and writes DESIGN.md files from them; it expects Stitch tools.

Choose by the problem: layouts look generic → Taste Skill; motion feels off → Emil Kowalski's skills; you want a consistent look you can describe in one file → a DESIGN.md.

Already on Skill Rank

If you would rather start with something we already index, three design entries cover nearby ground:

• Anthropic frontend-design — intentional visual direction for new UI
• Vercel web-design-guidelines — a review pass before launch
• Google Stitch design-md — turn a Stitch project into a DESIGN.md

Whatever you install, run the read-before-installing checklist and decide project or user scope first.