Anthropicof released a product called Claude Design in mid-April that got a lot of attention. The idea: use AI to generate proper design materials — presentations, brand documents, polished layouts. Impressive. Also: closed, cloud-only, tied entirely to one company.
Within days, a team called nexu-io put out Open Design. It's essentially the same idea, but you're in control. You bring your own AI key (Claude, Gemini, Cursor, or a dozen others), and the tool figures out which ones you already have set up. It comes loaded with 72 ready-made design systems and can export your work as a PDF, a presentation, a webpage, even a video.
Imagine asking an AI to produce a proper brand deck, a client proposal, or a product one-pager — and getting something that actually looks considered, not like a chatbot typed it into a blank document.
The piece that's genuinely clever: there's a connection (called an MCP server) that lets your AI assistant look at your design files directly while it works. No downloading, re-uploading, attaching. It just sees what's there and builds on it.
It's early. It's a bit rough. But 18,000 people starred it on GitHub in five days, which in that world means something.
You're producing proposals, decks, or brand materials regularly and you're tired of the gap between what AI can write and how it ends up looking.
Open-source — The code is public. Anyone can read it, copy it, improve it. It usually means free to use and no vendor lock-in.
Local-first — The tool runs on your machine or your own server, not on someone else's cloud. Your files don't leave unless you say so.
BYOK (Bring Your Own Key) — You connect the tool to an AI you already pay for, instead of paying yet another subscription to yet another platform.
MCP server — A small bridge that lets different software tools talk to each other in real time. Think of it as a live phone line between your AI and your files, instead of sending faxes back and forth.