Design.md News | November, 2026 (STARTUP EDITION)

TL;DR: Design.md News, November 2026: One File Can Make You an OK Designer

Table of Contents

Design.md news, November, 2026: one plain-text Markdown file now lets you ship consistent, on-brand screens without hiring a designer. Put DESIGN.md in your project root, and AI agents like Claude Code, Cursor, and Google Stitch follow your colors, fonts, and spacing instead of guessing.

What changed in 2026: Google open-sourced the format as an alpha draft spec in April. The repo reportedly gained 5,200 GitHub stars in 72 hours. Free libraries (awesome-design-md, designmd.ai), an MCP server, and generators like Context.dev followed.
What goes inside: The file holds exact tokens such as hex codes, type sizes, 8px spacing, radius, and motion timing. It also has a short "why" section on brand mood, plus states, dark mode, and a list of don'ts.
How to set it up in one afternoon: Generate a draft and cut every vague adjective. Add five "don't" rules and reference the file in CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md. Then test it on three screens and fix every gap the agent exposes.
What it won't do: It won't give you taste, fix a confusing flow, or replace user research. You still need visual hierarchy, contrast, spacing discipline, and precise critique words to judge the output.

Violetta Bonenkamp (Mean CEO) warns against cloning Stripe's or Linear's file wholesale, because copying a famous brand's look can create trade dress problems. Consistent "OK" design builds trust, and trust sells. To see how the format grew month by month, read the October DESIGN.md update. Then open the DESIGN.md guide for founders and write your own file this week, so your next screen looks like it belongs.

Check out other fresh startup news and trends that you might like:

Semrush vs Similarweb

When your AI coding agent ships 47 shades of blue before the Series A demo, it’s time to write a Design.md! Unsplash

Design.md news for November 2026 comes down to one fact that matters to every founder without a design budget: a single plain-text Markdown file now tells AI coding and design agents what your product should look like. It went from an internal format inside Google Stitch to an open draft specification, a GitHub phenomenon, and a growing ecosystem of free libraries and generators in less than a year. I’m Violetta Bonenkamp, also known as Mean CEO. I run CADChain and Fe/male Switch in parallel, and I built a full startup game entirely with no-code tooling. I have watched hundreds of founders ship products that worked fine and looked like five different apps glued together. DESIGN.md fixes a big part of that problem.

My take for this month is deliberately provocative. With a properly set up DESIGN.md and a handful of design skills, ANYONE can become an OK designer. I said OK, not brilliant. For a bootstrapped founder, a freelancer, or a small business owner, OK and consistent beats a beautiful homepage followed by a chaotic dashboard. This article covers what changed in 2026, how the file works, a step-by-step setup guide, the mistakes I see most often, and where I think founders are getting this wrong.

What is DESIGN.md, in plain words?

DESIGN.md is a plain-text Markdown file, usually placed in the root folder of a project, that describes a product’s visual system so AI agents can apply it when generating UI. It covers colors, typography, spacing, components, motion, and the rules for using them. It also explains the intent behind those choices in normal language. Agents such as Claude Code, Cursor, and Google Stitch read the file and build screens that actually look like your product.

The team behind the Context.dev DESIGN.md generator sums it up neatly: “Same idea as a README, but for design.” A README tells humans how a project works. AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md tell coding agents how to build it. DESIGN.md tells design and coding agents how it should look and feel.

The two halves of every DESIGN.md

The WHAT (design tokens): exact, machine-friendly values such as hex codes, font sizes, font weights, line heights, border radius, shadows, and spacing units. A design token is a named value stored once and reused everywhere, like a variable for design.
The WHY (qualitative intent): a written description of the design philosophy, mood, brand personality, and usage rules. This half helps the agent make sensible choices in situations your tokens do not cover.

The Department of Product breakdown of the DESIGN.md format gives a memorable illustration. A coding agent does not need to know that a brand color is “Golden Retriever orange” evoking joyful energy. It needs the hex code #855300, because a hex code is precise and executable. The story about joyful energy is for the moments when the agent has to improvise, such as designing an empty state nobody specified.

What happened with DESIGN.md in 2026?

Let’s break it down chronologically, because the speed of this story is part of the news. Most formats take years to gain traction. This one took weeks.

2025: DESIGN.md first appears as part of Google Stitch, Google’s AI design tool. Developers start writing their own versions outside Google’s tools, and companies begin sharing their files publicly.
April 2026: Google open-sources the format as a draft specification, so any tool or platform can adopt it. Google labels it “alpha”, which means it is still evolving.
72 hours after release: according to a widely shared LinkedIn post by product leader Aurelia Zambon, the repository collected 5,200 GitHub stars in 72 hours. For a spec about Markdown files, that is a wild number.
April 25, 2026: the Design Systems Collective publishes a deep look at how the Google Stitch plus Claude Code workflow quietly changed the design-to-code handoff.
May 2026: Better Stack publishes its community guide on DESIGN.md for AI coding agents, including structure, examples, and motion tokens.
June 17, 2026: UX Planet publishes a DESIGN.md best-practice guide, a sign that the format has moved from curiosity to craft discussion among UX designers.
By November 2026: community libraries such as awesome-design-md and designmd.ai host hundreds of ready-made files, an MCP server connects libraries straight to coding tools, and generators extract a DESIGN.md from any live website.

One comment under that LinkedIn post stuck with me. A French-speaking reader predicted that organizations structuring their conventions in plain text are preparing their teams for a standard that will dominate in 2027. I agree with the direction. If you are a founder reading this in late 2026, you are early, and early is where the cheap advantages live.

Can anyone really become an OK designer with DESIGN.md?

Yes, if you define “OK” honestly. An OK designer produces screens that are consistent, readable, accessible, and recognizably on-brand. An OK designer does not invent a new visual language or win awards. For most early-stage startups, freelancers, and small businesses, consistent and readable is exactly what customers need to trust you.

Here is why this works. Most bad founder design comes from inconsistency, and inconsistency comes from forgetting decisions. The AI agent forgets too. Without a DESIGN.md, every screen an agent builds looks slightly different: the wrong blue, the wrong font weight, buttons that match nothing else. A DESIGN.md gives the agent a persistent memory of your decisions, so it stops guessing.

From my linguistics background, I see DESIGN.md as a pragmatics problem. Pragmatics studies how meaning depends on context. When you tell an agent “make it look modern,” you hand it zero context, so it fills the gap with the statistical average of the internet. When you hand it a DESIGN.md, you give it the shared context that a junior designer would absorb after three months in your team. That is the whole trick. The file does the remembering, and you do the judging.

What DESIGN.md will NOT do for you

It will not give you taste. You still need to pick a direction and say no to bad output.
It will not fix a confusing product flow. Layout logic and information architecture still need human thinking.
It will not replace user research. Pretty screens that solve the wrong problem still fail.
It will not replace Figma for teams with real designers. As Aurelia Zambon put it: “Figma is where designers think. DESIGN.md is where agents learn what your product looks like.”

Why does an AI agent need a design file at all?

Your visual identity usually lives in a Figma file, a brand PDF, or a designer’s head. An AI coding agent cannot read any of those reliably. Markdown, on the other hand, is the format large language models read best. The maintainers of the awesome-design-md collection on GitHub put it bluntly: “It’s just a markdown file. No Figma exports, no JSON schemas, no special tooling.”

There is a bigger pattern behind this, and founders should pay attention to it. Expertise that used to sit inside proprietary tools is turning into portable text files that any agent can read. Code conventions moved into AGENTS.md. Workflows moved into Skills files, the Markdown instruction files Anthropic introduced to teach Claude repeatable tasks. Design systems are now moving into DESIGN.md. All of these live in your repository, versioned and portable, and readable by every agent on the market.

The agent instruction file family

README.md: read by humans, explains what the project is and how to run it.
AGENTS.md: read by coding agents, defines how to build the project.
CLAUDE.md: read by Claude Code, holds project instructions and conventions.
Skills files: read by agents, teach repeatable workflows such as “write a landing page” or “audit accessibility.”
DESIGN.md: read by design and coding agents, defines how the project should look and feel.

At CADChain, our whole philosophy is that IP protection should be an invisible, embedded layer inside daily CAD workflows, so engineers do not have to become IP lawyers. DESIGN.md applies the same logic to visual design. Founders should not have to become designers to ship consistent UI. The rules live inside the workflow, and the agent follows them automatically.

What goes inside a good DESIGN.md file?

A solid DESIGN.md covers seven areas. You can start with three and add the rest as your product grows. The Better Stack guide to DESIGN.md for AI coding agents recommends going as far as motion, with durations such as 150ms for fast interactions and 300ms for standard transitions, plus cubic-bezier easing curves.

Overview and brand personality: three to five sentences about mood, audience, and what the product should never feel like.
Color tokens: name, hex value, and usage for each color, including hover, error, success, and dark mode variants.
Typography: font families, sizes, weights, and line heights for headings and body text.
Spacing and layout: a base unit (often 4px or 8px) and the allowed steps, plus grid and max-width rules.
Components: buttons, cards, inputs, modals, with radius, shadow, padding, and states.
Motion: durations and easing for interactions and transitions.
Rules and don’ts: explicit constraints such as “one main call-to-action per screen” or “never put gray text on colored backgrounds.”

A practical example for a small business

Below is a compact DESIGN.md I would write for a fictional bakery booking app. Notice how the tokens are exact and the rules are short. Notice also the “Voice” section: design agents generate copy too, so tone belongs in the file.

# DESIGN.md: Crumb, a bakery booking app

## Overview
Warm, calm, trustworthy. Feels like a neighborhood bakery, never like a bank.
Audience: busy parents ordering cakes from a phone.

## Colors
| Token       | Hex     | Usage                          |
|-------------|---------|--------------------------------|
| brand       | #B5532A | Main buttons, active links     |
| brand-hover | #8E3F1F | Hover and pressed states       |
| surface     | #FFF8F1 | Page and card background       |
| ink         | #2B2118 | Body text                      |
| ink-muted   | #6B5B4E | Helper text, captions          |
| danger      | #B42318 | Errors only                    |

## Typography
- Headings: Fraunces, weight 600
- Body: Inter, 16px, weight 400, line-height 1.5
- H1: 32px / H2: 24px / H3: 20px

## Spacing
- Base unit: 8px. Allowed values: 4, 8, 16, 24, 32, 48

## Components
- Buttons: 10px radius, min height 44px, brand fill, white text
- Cards: surface background, 12px radius, shadow 0 2px 8px rgba(0,0,0,0.06)

## Motion
- 150ms ease-out for taps, 300ms ease-in-out for panels

## Rules
- One brand-colored button per screen
- Never place ink-muted text on the brand color
- Use photos of real cakes, never stock illustrations

## Voice
- Short sentences. No exclamation marks in error messages.

This file fits on one screen, and an agent can apply it to a booking form, a checkout page, and an admin dashboard without drifting. That is the bar you are aiming for.

How do you set up DESIGN.md step by step?

Next steps. This is the setup I recommend to founders inside Fe/male Switch, and it takes one focused afternoon. In line with my “default to no-code until you hit a hard wall” principle, none of these steps require you to write code yourself.

Collect your raw material. Gather your logo, any colors and fonts you already use, three screenshots of screens you like, and three screenshots of competitors you want to look different from.

Collect your raw material. Gather your logo, any colors and fonts you already use, three screenshots of screens you like, and three screenshots of competitors you want to look different from.
Generate a first draft. If you already have a website, run it through the Context.dev generator, which takes a domain and returns its colors, fonts, components, and visual rules as a DESIGN.md. If you have nothing yet, start from a community file and adapt it. You can also point your AI agent at Google’s spec plus your brand assets and draft the file together, as Red Ridge Digital recommends.
Cut the vague stuff. Delete every adjective that has no number attached. “Modern and clean” means nothing to an agent. “8px radius, Inter 16px, max two colors per screen” means everything. Red Ridge Digital says it well: “Clear, specific rules work better than long ones.”
Write the WHY section. Add three to five sentences about who your customer is and how the product should feel. This guides the agent when it hits a situation your tokens never covered.
Add DON’T rules. Agents follow prohibitions surprisingly well. List the five things you never want to see, such as gradients, centered body text, or more than one font family.
Place the file in the project root. Put DESIGN.md next to your README.md. That is the whole install.
Wire it into your agent instructions. Open CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md and add a line saying that any time the agent creates UI, it must reference DESIGN.md. A popular YouTube tutorial on making your design system work with AI stresses this step, because the agent reads CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md first.
Stress-test with three screens. Ask the agent to build a landing page, a form, and a settings page. Put them side by side. Wherever the agent made things up, fix the gap in the file.
Link out for depth. For complex products, keep DESIGN.md short and link to deeper documents for each component family. The file defines the design overall, while the linked resources carry the details a real product needs.
Version and maintain it. Commit the file to Git. When your design changes, update the file first, then regenerate screens.

Pair DESIGN.md with a design Skill

DESIGN.md describes how things look. A Skill file describes how a task gets done. Combining the two is where an OK designer setup starts to feel like a small design team. I write a short Skill called “screen review” that tells the agent to check every new screen against DESIGN.md, verify contrast, confirm only one main action exists, and list deviations before showing me the result. The agent becomes its own first reviewer, and I only judge the final round.

Which design skills do founders still need when agents push the pixels?

The angle of this article includes “design skills” for a reason. The file handles consistency, and a few human skills handle judgment. You can learn all of these in a weekend, and they will save you months of ugly screens.

Visual hierarchy: knowing that the most important thing on a screen should be the biggest, boldest, or most colorful, and that only one thing can win.
Contrast and accessibility: knowing that light gray text on white loses readers and fails WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) checks. The open spec reportedly includes WCAG validation, but you still need to notice when something feels hard to read.
Spacing discipline: using a small, fixed set of spacing values. Random gaps are the fastest tell of amateur design.
Restraint: two fonts maximum, one accent color, few shadows. Founders tend to add, and good design tends to remove.
Writing for screens: short labels, clear button verbs, honest error messages. As a linguist, I insist that copy is half of design.
Critique vocabulary: being able to tell an agent exactly what is wrong. “The card padding is 24px instead of 16px” fixes things. “It feels off” wastes an hour.

In Fe/male Switch, we teach through quests with real consequences, because education must be experiential and slightly uncomfortable. Apply that here. Do not read ten design books. Generate a screen, critique it out loud in specific terms, fix the file, and repeat until your vocabulary sharpens. Ten rounds of this will teach you more than a course.

Where can you find DESIGN.md files and tools?

The ecosystem grew fast in 2026. Here are the resources I would bookmark, with what each one is good for.

awesome-design-md by VoltAgent: a curated, MIT-licensed collection of DESIGN.md files analyzed from developer-focused brands such as Stripe, Linear, and Vercel. Each entry ships with the DESIGN.md plus preview.html and preview-dark.html catalogs showing swatches, type scale, buttons, and cards. You can also request a file for a specific website.
designmd.ai: the DESIGN.md community library for AI builders hosts hundreds of free design systems, with featured and trending lists and an MCP server. MCP stands for Model Context Protocol, the open standard that lets AI tools connect to outside data sources, so your coding tool can pull design systems directly.
Context.dev DESIGN.md Generator: enter any domain and receive a DESIGN.md built from that site’s colors, fonts, and components, powered by their Styleguide and Scrape APIs. Ideal for founders who already have a website and want to keep new screens matching it.
Google Stitch: the AI design tool where the format originated. Useful if you want to generate visual concepts and export a matching DESIGN.md.
Learning material: the UX Planet guide to DESIGN.md best practices, the Design Systems Collective article on the Google Stitch and Claude Code workflow, the Red Ridge Digital guide to keeping AI design on-brand with DESIGN.md, and the video tutorial on making your design system work with AI.

What are the most common DESIGN.md mistakes to avoid?

I review a lot of founder setups. These are the mistakes that show up again and again, roughly in order of how much damage they cause.

Cloning a famous brand wholesale. Dropping Stripe’s or Linear’s DESIGN.md into your project and shipping is tempting. Your product then looks like a knockoff, and customers notice. With my IP hat on: a distinctive overall look can carry legal weight as trade dress in some jurisdictions, and copying it too closely invites confusion with a brand you do not own. Use famous files as a starting skeleton, then change colors, fonts, and personality.
Writing vibes instead of values. “Elegant, premium, minimal” with no numbers gives the agent nothing to execute. Every quality claim needs a token or a rule behind it.
Writing a novel. A 40-page DESIGN.md dilutes attention. Keep the main file tight and link to deeper documents.
Forgetting to reference the file. If CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md do not tell the agent to read DESIGN.md before building UI, it will often skip it.
Skipping states. Hover, focus, disabled, error, loading, and empty states are where agents improvise most. Define them.
Ignoring dark mode. If your users can switch themes, define dark tokens now, or the agent will invent them.
No DON’T list. Prohibitions are cheap to write and save hours of cleanup.
Treating the file as finished. Your design changes, so the file must change. An outdated DESIGN.md is worse than none, because it confidently enforces old decisions.
Accepting AI drafts without review. AI is great for the first draft. You must read every line and cut anything vague or invented.
Forgetting it is alpha. Google labels the spec alpha. Expect changes, keep your file simple, and avoid depending on exotic fields that might disappear.

What do most founders get wrong about DESIGN.md?

Here are my less comfortable takes, shaped by running deeptech and edtech ventures in parallel and watching how founders actually behave.

Take 1: Consistency is a trust signal, and trust is a revenue signal

Founders treat design as decoration. Buyers treat it as evidence. When your pricing page, checkout, and dashboard look like three different companies built them, a cautious customer wonders what else is inconsistent. A DESIGN.md is the cheapest credibility upgrade available to a solo founder in 2026. It costs an afternoon, and it changes how every future screen looks.

Take 2: The describers will beat the drawers

Aurelia Zambon wrote that “the teams that describe their product best will ship the most consistent work.” I would push it further. In an agent-first workflow, the ability to describe precisely becomes a design skill on its own. This favors people with writing and language backgrounds, which is great news for many non-technical founders who assumed design was closed to them. I studied linguistics for years before I touched a startup, and I find this shift deeply satisfying.

Take 3: Women founders need infrastructure, and this is infrastructure

One of my operating principles is that women do not need more inspiration; they need infrastructure. Design has long been a hidden cost that pushes underfunded founders into either expensive agencies or embarrassing prototypes. A free community DESIGN.md, a generator, and an AI coding agent remove a structural barrier. That matters more than another motivational panel.

Take 4: Your DESIGN.md is an asset, so treat it like one

At CADChain, we obsess over who owns digital files and how they travel. Your DESIGN.md encodes your brand decisions in a portable, copyable form. Keep it in a private repository if your brand is part of your edge, track changes in Git, and be thoughtful before publishing it to a public library. Sharing can earn you visibility, and it also hands competitors a recipe for your look.

Take 5: Play with it like a game

Gamepreneurship, the method I built at Fe/male Switch, treats entrepreneurship as a role-playing game with rules, quests, and consequences. DESIGN.md is literally the rulebook for your product’s visual world. Set yourself a quest: three screens in one hour, zero manual pixel edits, every deviation fixed inside the file instead of the code. You will learn the format faster than any tutorial can teach it.

Is DESIGN.md an official industry standard yet?

No. As of November 2026, DESIGN.md is an open draft specification that Google labels alpha. It has huge community momentum, but no standards body has ratified it. That said, its plain-text nature makes the risk tiny. If the spec changes, you edit a Markdown file. If a different format wins, an agent can convert your file in seconds.

The bigger risk is waiting. Founders who set up their file now will have months of refined rules, tested prompts, and consistent screens by the time competitors start. That gap compounds with every screen you ship.

DESIGN.md FAQ for founders and freelancers

Where do I put the DESIGN.md file?

Place it in the root of your project repository, next to README.md. Then reference it in CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md so your agents read it before generating UI.

Which AI tools can read DESIGN.md?

Any AI coding tool that reads project files can use it, including Claude Code, Cursor, and Google Stitch. A simple prompt such as “Use the @DESIGN.md file and style my app” is enough to start.

Do I need a designer to write a DESIGN.md?

No. You can generate a draft from your website, adapt a community file, or co-write one with an AI agent. A designer’s review helps, but it is optional for an early product.

How long should a DESIGN.md be?

Short enough to read in five minutes. For complex products, keep the main file focused on the overall system and link out to deeper component documents.

Is it legal to use a DESIGN.md based on a famous brand?

Community collections such as awesome-design-md are released under the MIT license, which covers the files themselves. Copying a famous brand’s look so closely that customers confuse you with them is a separate question involving trademark and trade dress. Use these files as learning templates and make your own brand distinct. If your brand is central to your business, talk to an IP professional.

What should you do this week?

The biggest piece of Design.md news this November is how ordinary the format has become. It started as a Google Stitch feature, went open source in April 2026, collected thousands of GitHub stars in days, and now powers free libraries, generators, and MCP servers. For entrepreneurs, startup founders, freelancers, and small business owners, it means good-enough design no longer requires a design hire. It requires one well-written file, a few human design skills, and the discipline to keep both updated.

Today: generate or download a starter DESIGN.md and put it in your project root.
Tomorrow: cut every vague adjective, add your WHY section, and write five DON’T rules.
This week: reference the file in CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md, build three test screens, and fix every gap the agent exposes.
This month: add a design review Skill, define states and dark mode, and commit the file to version control.

My advice as Mean CEO is simple. Stop waiting to afford a designer before your product looks trustworthy. Write the rules down, let the agents follow them, and spend your own energy on customers, pricing, and the decisions only a founder can make. OK design, applied consistently, will carry you further than you think.

FAQ on DESIGN.md for Founders and AI-Built Products in 2026

Should I write DESIGN.md tokens in YAML front matter or Markdown tables?

Google's spec allows optional YAML front matter for tokens, followed by Markdown prose for intent. Use YAML if you plan to parse tokens into code or validators. Use tables if humans edit the file most. Never define the same value both ways, or agents get conflicting instructions. Read the June 2026 DESIGN.md specification breakdown

How do I keep DESIGN.md in sync with Figma variables and CSS tokens?

Pick one source of truth. If designers work in Figma, export variables and regenerate DESIGN.md tokens from them. If not, let DESIGN.md lead and generate CSS custom properties or a Tailwind config from it. Tell agents to use variable names, never raw hex codes, so changes propagate everywhere. See why Figma and DESIGN.md are discussed together

Does DESIGN.md work with vibe coding platforms like Lovable, Bolt, or v0?

It can work even without a repository. Paste the file into the platform's project knowledge, custom instructions, or first prompt. Restate "follow DESIGN.md" when starting new pages, and re-share it after every edit, because these tools may keep using older context. Explore Vibe Coding For Startups

Can I use DESIGN.md to onboard freelance developers and contractors?

Yes, and it saves billable hours. Send DESIGN.md with every brief instead of a brand deck, and make "matches DESIGN.md" an acceptance criterion in the contract. Contractors using AI agents inherit your rules instantly, and reviews become objective because the padding either matches the token or it doesn't. Discover design.md as a contractor onboarding playbook

How should I encode accessibility rules inside DESIGN.md?

Write accessibility as hard numbers. Require a minimum contrast of 4.5:1 for body text and 3:1 for large text, define a visible focus ring token, set 44px minimum touch targets, and add a reduced-motion rule. Pair each color token with its approved text color so agents never guess combinations. Read Aurelia Zambon on DESIGN.md's built-in WCAG validation

How do I turn an existing brand guidelines PDF into a DESIGN.md?

Give the PDF, logo files, and website screenshots to your AI agent along with the DESIGN.md spec, then ask for a draft. Translate every brand adjective into a token or rule, delete marketing fluff, and leave out print-only guidance. Agents need screen values, not CMYK codes. Follow Red Ridge Digital's guide to on-brand DESIGN.md files

How can I visually check my DESIGN.md before agents start building?

Ask your agent to generate a preview.html page that renders every token: color swatches, type scale, buttons in all states, cards, and dark surfaces. Wrong values become obvious in seconds. Community collections ship preview.html and preview-dark.html files for this purpose, so copy their structure. Browse the awesome-design-md preview catalogs on GitHub

How does DESIGN.md change the handoff between designers and developers?

The designer's main deliverable shifts from static mockups to a maintained rulebook. Designers explore in Stitch or Figma and encode decisions in DESIGN.md, then coding agents like Claude Code implement them directly. Developers stop measuring screenshots, and designers review live builds against the file instead of redlining. Read how the Stitch and Claude Code workflow changed handoff

Can DESIGN.md help my landing pages convert better?

It helps indirectly. Consistent typography, one dominant call-to-action, and readable contrast make pages easier to scan and trust, which supports conversions. DESIGN.md also lets you build campaign, service, and founder pages in minutes, so you can A/B test offers without waiting on design. See how founders generate landing pages with DESIGN.md

How should I phrase prompts so agents actually follow my DESIGN.md?

Reference the file explicitly, name the screen's single goal, and point to tokens rather than adjectives. For example: "Build a pricing page using DESIGN.md; brand button only on the annual plan." Ask the agent to list deviations before coding. Short, constrained prompts beat long creative ones. Learn why prompt writing is now design direction

Violetta Bonenkamp

Violetta Bonenkamp, also known as Mean CEO, is a female entrepreneur and an experienced startup founder, bootstrapping her startups. She has an impressive educational background including an MBA and four other higher education degrees. She has over 20 years of work experience across multiple countries, including 10 years as a solopreneur and serial entrepreneur. Throughout her startup experience she has applied for multiple startup grants at the EU level, in the Netherlands and Malta, and her startups received quite a few of those. She’s been living, studying and working in many countries around the globe and her extensive multicultural experience has influenced her immensely. Constantly learning new things, like AI, SEO, zero code, code, etc. and scaling her businesses through smart systems.