Insane Claude Design Skills You Need To Build Beautiful Websites transcript

Here's something that people get wrong. Models have gotten way better at design, and we've seen them keep improving every day. But at some point, all those great designs start to look the same. So, the real question is, what makes your design actually stand out? A lot of that comes down to the right prompts and instructions. And this is where skills come in, because now the ones that actually work can be packaged into a reusable workflow you can share with anyone.

So, a lot of people have been building skills for design, and some of the best ones come straight from the teams behind the tools. But not every skill out there is worth using, and a lot of them don't really help with your design. Now, for some context, we're a software company, and this is our channel AI Labs. And on this channel, we show you how to optimize processes with AI, just like how we've optimized our own. Before we dive into some of the more creative skills, let's start with one that forms the basis of many other design skills.

Anthropic's front-end design skill is the one that shapes the design direction of your site, and we've used it in our previous video, too. After you've generated enough landing pages with AI, you start noticing a pattern where the sites are all different, but somehow feel the same. That's because the model learned from a huge amount of data full of the same patterns. So, whenever it has to make a design call, it reaches for the most common one.

So, the design keeps drifting toward the same safe, generic choices, no matter what the project actually is. And that's the exact problem this skill solves. It escapes those safe choices by forcing the model to commit to a real design direction before it writes anything. Instead of defaulting to the safe, common look, it has to pick a direction and stay consistent with it. It even out the usual AI slop directly in its skill.md file, which is basically the skills instruction sheet, so the model stops reaching for the same overused fonts and the purple gradients on white backgrounds.

And that matters more than it sounds, because when most models build a landing page, they're optimizing to be correct. But this skill pushes them to commit to a design direction instead. So, we mainly reach for it on landing pages or portfolios where the design itself is part of the product, since it gives the model a stronger point of view before it starts. To test it, we had it build a landing page and gave it our requirements and it generated a site with none of the usual AI slop because it stuck to the design direction it committed to instead of drifting into the usual defaults.

In AI Lab's design system, we've got two skills each made for a separate job. There's the functional skill which builds the UI people actually have to use like dashboards and then there's one for marketing UI. Inside the marketing one, the skill.md uses a prompt called break the default and that's basically Anthropic's front-end design skill just modified a bit. We modified it because the original's gotten a little outdated for the newer models.

Opus 4.8 and Fable 5 both shipped with prompting guides that show how Claude's changed and how the instructions you give it need to change too. So, we folded a version of that into our own design system. As we've already [snorts] stated, the Anthropic design skill does not work well with functional UI. Once you're building actual products, the problem changes completely. You're not just trying to make something look good anymore.

You're trying to build something that works as a product with a lot of components that all have to behave properly. This is where things shift from landing pages into real applications. For example, in AI Lab's Pro, you can see that the landing page has a much more artistic design language as opposed to the actual functional layer of the community which looks really boring and plain just like any other web interface you have ever interacted with and that's where shadcn comes in.

Now, models can absolutely build dashboards on their own, but every one of the components commonly used in dashboards already exists built to a professional standard by actual people. So, the model doesn't have to generate components from scratch and configure animations on its own. It can just pull the component that's already pre-built in the registry which is basically a big library of ready-made components. That's the whole point of shadcn.

Instead of the model hand-building each component, it just pulls from that library of parts that are already professional grade and uses them in your app and that's why the result feels like a real product, because you're not starting from a rough first draft and slowly fixing it up. You're starting from parts that were already built to ship. The Shadcn setup has two parts that work together. The first one is the skill.

Think of it as a rulebook. Shadcn has a specific correct way of building things and the skill holds all of those rules. On top of that, it looks at how your own project is set up. So, when you ask the model to build something, the skill makes sure the result follows Shadcn's rules and fits the way your project already works. The benefit is simple. You get clean output the first time instead of having to go back and fix the same mistakes over and over.

The second is the Shadcn MCP. It's basically a live connection to Shadcn's registry that lets the model browse and pull real components straight into your project. Now, you might think, "Why use the skill if the MCP already exists and gives you the components you need?" The answer is that the skill only loads when it's actually needed instead of being in the context window all the time like MCP does. The Shadcn skill gives the coding agent the rules, patterns, and the context about your project.

Together, those give it the judgment to use components correctly. With a normal app, you build it up one component at a time, and that approach works well. So, you might expect it to carry straight over to a dashboard. And it partly does, but dashboards have a different core problem than normal apps. It's less about keeping components consistent and more about how all the information is arranged on the screen. That means working out how to group the data and how much can live on one screen before it gets too cluttered.

So, there's a separate skill named dashboard made just for that. Not by Shadcn, but by another developer. And it focuses the model on exactly that arrangement. And because it reasons through that arrangement first, the result actually feels like a real analytics tool instead of being cluttered. UI UX Pro Max works differently from everything so far. Most skills hand the model some design principles and trust it to apply them, but this one runs an actual engine first.

The problem it's built around is that even with good direction and a solid set of components, the model still has to decide what kind of design choices fit your product. Most skills treat design as one general idea of good, so everything drifts toward the same look no matter what you're building. And that's the gap this skill closes. When you ask it to build something, it doesn't jump straight to code. It runs an engine first.

Behind the scenes, this engine fires off five searches at once across its own open-source database on GitHub. It pulls the styles that fit your product from 161 industry categories. And out of those choices, it picks a color palette, a font pairing, and a page layout that actually suits the industry you're building for. Then it filters out anything that would look wrong for that kind of product and hands the model a tailored design system, which is basically the complete rulebook the model follows to build the website.

So you get a genuinely strong website where it matches every design attribute to your website idea. Instead of the model inventing a design and hoping it works, it's building from one that was actually reasoned out for your exact use case. This skill is really different from the others. The others give the model better taste, while this one gives it a decision before it starts tuned to the kind of product you're actually making.

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So, if you're a student or researcher, connect the SciSpace app inside ChatGPT using the first link in the description and start getting research you can finally trust. So far, everything we've added makes the site look right while it's sitting still, but a static page only gets you so far. Animations are actually important because they improve the user experience and they bump up how long people stay on the website.

But, the problem is animation is where AI-generated code falls apart. The actual problem is that when you ask a model to add animation, it almost always does the exact same thing, where things slide into view as you scroll down the page. That one scroll reveal is basically the only move it knows. But, it's also the same animation on half the AI-built sites out there and it's nowhere near what real motion can do. This is where the GSAP skill comes in.

GSAP is the animation library a lot of professional sites already run on and this skill comes straight from the team that builds it. So, instead of the model guessing how it works, it works from the correct patterns and it covers everything from basic movement to the bigger animations that play as you scroll down a page. It also handles the performance side, which is the part most people underestimate. A big reason AI animations feel janky is that the model moves things by changing their size or position and those changes force the browser to rebuild the whole page on every single frame.

So, the skill steers the model toward the kind of movement the browser can handle easily and that one habit alone is what keeps the animation smooth. GSAP is at its best on landing pages and scroll-driven storytelling, where everything gets revealed like a story. So, the important details land with the viewer and that's what takes your website from a static page to a dynamic one. This is why in the AI Labs design system, we have explicitly mentioned in the marketing UI skill that whenever animations are required, it should use the GSAP skill to implement those animations on the landing pages.

This next [snorts] group of skills isn't for full systems. They're taste presets you drop in to push the model toward one specific look of your choice. First, there's the minimalist UI one. It's the type of design where instead of cramming too much onto the page, you keep things simple and open. It's the one you reach for on newspapers or blog sites where you want the content to breathe instead of everything fighting for attention.

On the complete opposite side, there's the industrial brutalist UI skill, which goes raw and heavy with that anti-corporate style. Then there's front-end UI/UX, a general all-rounder for solid defaults when you don't want anything extreme. It's the safe pick for a product or a business landing page that just needs to look clean and professional. And then there's the premium front-end UI skill, which makes sites look like those luxury fashion brand landing pages.

So, you don't stack all of these at once. Instead, you pick the one that matches the vibe you're after and let it steer the design. So, if you've already got a direction in your head, these are the fastest way to hand it straight to the model. By this point, you can build a site that's structured well, moves nicely, and has a real style. But professional-grade websites need more than just animations. For professional apps, you need real image and video visuals.

Models on their own mostly just grab stock images off the internet. And most of the time, they don't actually match what you need. Higgs Field is what we use to skip that. It plugs image and video generation straight into your agent, so you can ask for a hero image or a background clip right where you're working without ever leaving the terminal. And Higgs Field isn't tied to one model. It's got most of the good image and video models, so you're not stuck with the strengths of just one, and you can use whichever one suits you.

If you're doing video, See Dance is the one worth using, since it's one of the best video generation models right now. So, you get real visuals instead of static text or gray placeholder boxes on your website. >> [snorts] >> The previous skills were all for web. Now, we're going to cover mobile skills, where a lot of AI-generated UI quietly falls apart for a simple reason. Models tend to treat a phone like a small website, taking the same web habits and shrinking them down.

But mobile isn't a smaller web. It's its own thing with its own rules. The way people hold a phone, where their thumb can actually reach, how navigation should work, it's all different. And every platform has its own design language that the model usually doesn't follow properly. There are multiple skills to optimize mobile development, too. The first is mobile app UI design, the principles layer. On its own, the model treats the rules of good mobile design pretty loosely, but this skill bakes them in directly.

That covers things like the thumb zone, which keeps main buttons where your thumb can actually reach, along with consistent spacing and a clean limited set of font sizes instead of 10 different ones. And these are basically the same rules behind popular apps like Airbnb, Duolingo, and Spotify. So, the model ends up designing with that sense instead of guessing at it. The second is Material 3, which is basically the mobile version of what Shazam CN did for the web.

It gives the model Google's actual design system, the one behind most Android and Pixel apps. Google's design language has a real personality. It's bold and colorful with big rounded shapes and springy motion that sit at the more expressive end of mobile design. The skill brings the whole system of components and colors. So, you hand it one color and it builds a full matching theme. It even checks how closely your app follows Google's guidelines, so the app you're building matches the design system exactly.

But, if you're building fully native on the iPhone, you can use the Swift UI skills. Apple's design sits at the opposite end from Google. Where Material is bold and colorful, Apple is more restrained and it leans on that translucent glassy look it now calls liquid glass. The skill pulls Apple's own documentation straight out of Xcode on your Mac and hands it to the model as the rules. So, the model isn't guessing at what an Apple app should feel like, it's working from Apple's actual guidance.

And instead of something that only looks roughly like an iPhone app, you actually get one that feels native. And if you're building for iPhone and Android at the same time, there's the official Expo skill. Expo is a framework for making one app that runs on both Android and iOS. So, you're not building the same app twice. It covers everything you need for a real app that runs on both, from the navigation and styling to the platform features, all in one place.

So, whether you're building for one platform or both at once, there's a skill that actually knows the territory. Now, all the skills and workflows and everything else we build and show you in these videos can be found in AI Labs Pro, which is our community. That's where you'll get the resources, the starter packs, and more, along with a place to interact with a bunch of like-minded nerds, including our team. So, if you found value in what we do and want to support the channel, this is the best way to do it.

The link's in the description. That brings us to the end of this video. If you'd like to support the channel and help us keep making videos like this, you can do so by using the Super Thanks button below. As always, thank you for watching, and I'll see you in the next one.