Design isn’t only for people with “designer” in their job title. If you build a page, make a form or write an email, you’re making design decisions, whether you call them that or not. Claude Code has seven skills to help with that, and the nice part is you don’t install or configure any of them. You turn them on with a sentence.
A skill is nothing more than a set of instructions Claude picks up the moment you describe the matching task. Below I walk through all seven, each with what it does, when you reach for it, and the sentence that activates it.
The seven skills
1. design:accessibility-review runs a full accessibility check on a design or page. Handy right before you put something live, or when you’re not sure your site works for someone who sees poorly or navigates by keyboard. It looks at color contrast, keyboard operation, the size of touch targets, and how a screen reader reads your page out.
“Do an accessibility review of this page.”
2. design:design-critique gives you structured feedback on usability, hierarchy and consistency. Reach for it when something’s finished but you feel it isn’t right yet, from first sketch to final polish.
“Give a design critique of this design.”
3. design:design-handoff writes the complete handoff for a developer: the layout, the design tokens, the properties of each component, the different states, the breakpoints for mobile and the edge cases. This saves you the endless back and forth when you pass a design to whoever’s going to build it.
“Make a design handoff of this component.”
4. design:design-system helps you set up, document or extend your design system. It spots naming conflicts and values you hardcoded by accident instead of pulling from your system, and writes documentation for your component variants. Useful once you have more than a few pages and the overview starts leaking away.
“Audit my design system.”
5. design:research-synthesis chews through user interviews, surveys, usability tests, support tickets and customer scores into patterns, user groups and recommendations. Reach for it when you have a pile of loose signals and don’t know where to start.
“Summarize this user research with research-synthesis.”
6. design:user-research helps you plan, run and process research. From the question list for an interview to a usability test to the final report. For when you want to know what your users actually do instead of what you think they do.
“Help me with user research for this feature.”
7. design:ux-copy writes and reviews the small texts you forget easily: buttons, error messages, empty screens, confirmations, the first steps for new users. Those little lines decide whether someone gets your product or drops off.
“Review the ux copy in this form.”
How to combine them
On their own they’re handy, but the gain is in the chain. An example of how I do it myself:
- I make a first version of a page in Claude Design.
- I run design-critique over it: is the structure right, does the page lead the eye where it should?
- I run accessibility-review to check it also works for someone who sees poorly or uses the keyboard.
- I put the text through ux-copy so the buttons and messages are clear.
- Once it stands, I write the handoff with design-handoff, so the build goes without guesswork.
You don’t reach for every skill on every small job. But the order of “make first, then review, then hand off” catches most mistakes before they go live.
Accessibility is built in by default
This is the part I find most important, and it’s easy to lose as a side note. All seven design skills take digital accessibility into account by default, at the WCAG 2.1 AA level. That’s the international standard for websites that work for everyone, including people with a disability.
The point is that it’s built in, not optional. You don’t have to ask for it separately. Ask design-critique for feedback and accessibility is already in the lens it looks through. Have ux-copy rewrite an error message and it accounts for readability. It’s not an extra button you switch on and then forget, it’s the default. Why that’s more than a technical detail, and why in the Netherlands it now counts legally too, is exactly what part 3 is about.
The caveat
A skill doesn’t take over the thinking. Design-critique gives you feedback, but the choice of what to do with it stays yours, and sometimes the model is wrong. Research-synthesis finds patterns in your data, but whether those patterns hold depends on how good your research was: rubbish in is rubbish out. And a handoff document is only as valuable as your design is considered. The skills speed up good work, they don’t rescue bad work.
So use them as a second pair of eyes that never gets tired, not as a replacement for your own judgment. Used that way they’re exactly what you want: something that picks up the boring half of the checking work, so you have time for the choices that actually matter.
This is part 2 of a series on designing with Claude. Read part 1 on Claude Design too. In part 3 I dig into digital accessibility: what it is, why it’s legally required, and how to get your own site checked.