Are these design skills free?

Yes. All three are open-source on GitHub. Impeccable is Apache-2.0, the other two are MIT. You still need a Claude plan for Claude itself.

Do I need all three, or is one enough?

One is enough to start, and they overlap a little. Take Impeccable first for its audit and critique commands, then add the animation skills as soon as anything on your page moves.

Do these only work with Claude Code?

Impeccable supports Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Gemini CLI and several others. The other two install through a shared skills CLI and work anywhere that reads skills.

Will installing them change my existing project files?

No. Installing adds skill files that shape how Claude makes design decisions going forward. It does not rewrite your code.

3 Free Skills That Give Claude Actual Design Taste

Working code is not the same as good design

Claude will build the thing you asked for and it will run. Then you look at it and the spacing is off, the animation eases the wrong direction, and every border is a solid one-pixel line. Nothing is broken. It just looks like a project built by a machine.

That gap is taste, and taste is teachable. Three people packaged theirs up and gave it away.

What each one does

Skill	Who made it	What it fixes
Impeccable	pbakaus	A whole design language, plus commands to audit and polish a page you already built
Skills for Design Engineers	emilkowalski	Animation judgment. Easing, timing, and the small choices that read as expensive
Taste-Skill	leonxlnx	Stops the generic look outright. Brand kits and named visual directions

All three are free and open-source. Impeccable is Apache-2.0, the other two are MIT.

Before you start

Node.js — all three install through the terminal using npx, which ships with Node.
Claude Code, already set up — these teach Claude how to make design decisions. They do not replace it.
A real project open — install from the folder your project lives in, not an empty directory.

Two of them share one installer

This trips people up, so it is worth saying up front. Skills for Design Engineers and Taste-Skill both install through the same community skills CLI. Impeccable ships its own installer. Same idea, different command, and mixing them up is the most common mistake.

Step 1 — Impeccable

Run this from the root of your project:

npx impeccable install

It detects which AI tools you have set up, asks whether to install into this project or globally, and wires itself in. Reload Claude Code afterward or it will not pick the skill up.

Once it is in, you get commands that work on pages you have already built:

/impeccable audit blog
/impeccable critique landing
/impeccable polish settings
/impeccable harden checkout

You can also just describe what you want instead of using a subcommand:

/impeccable redo this hero section

To refresh it later, run npx impeccable update.

Step 2 — Skills for Design Engineers

npx skills@latest add emilkowalski/skills

This one is specifically about motion. It ships eight skills covering animation vocabulary, finding places worth animating, reviewing animation you already have, picking a UI library, and an Apple-design pass.

The reason it matters: agents pick the wrong easing constantly. An ease-in on something entering the screen when it should be ease-out. A solid border where a soft shadow would look better. Each mistake is tiny and they compound into an interface that feels cheap.

Step 3 — Taste-Skill

npx skills add https://github.com/Leonxlnx/taste-skill

That installs the whole set, which is fourteen skills covering brand kits, a minimalist direction, a brutalist direction, image-to-code, and redesign passes.

If you only want one, pass its name:

npx skills add https://github.com/Leonxlnx/taste-skill --skill "design-taste-frontend"

What to do once they are in

Do not install all three and then keep prompting the way you always did. Name the tool you want in the request:

Build the pricing page, then run /impeccable critique on it before you show me.

For anything with motion, ask for the animation pass explicitly. For anything where the whole look feels generic, reach for Taste-Skill and name a direction instead of asking for "modern."

Three things that trip people up

Not reloading after installing Impeccable — it wires itself into your tool's config, and that config gets read at startup. Skip the reload and it looks like nothing happened.
Guessing the single-skill name — the name you pass to --skill is the one written inside the skill file, which is not always the folder name. Install the whole set first and look at what actually landed.
Expecting them to fix a finished project on their own — these change how Claude decides things going forward. On something already built, use the audit and critique commands rather than hoping it self-corrects.

Frequently asked questions

Are these free? — Yes. All three are open-source on GitHub. Impeccable is Apache-2.0, the other two are MIT. You still need a Claude plan for Claude itself.
Do I need all three? — No, and they overlap a little. If you only take one, take Impeccable for its audit commands. Add the animation skills the moment anything on your page moves.
Do they only work with Claude? — Impeccable supports Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Gemini CLI, and several others. The other two install as skills through a shared CLI and work anywhere that reads skills.
Will they change my existing files? — Installing does not touch your project code. It adds skill files that shape how Claude makes decisions from then on.
Do I need an API key? — No. None of the three ask for an account or a key.

Get them

Impeccable — https://github.com/pbakaus/impeccable
Skills for Design Engineers — https://github.com/emilkowalski/skills
Taste-Skill — https://github.com/leonxlnx/taste-skill