The full upstream README, mirrored here for reference. Install config, tool schemas, adoption signals, and an original overview live on the Artisign listing page.
An artificial artisan for UI design: agents build screens, a design system keeps them consistent.
Local-first UX design tool for AI agents. Agents design through MCP, the human reviews in the browser, state lives in plain files.
One Node process on 127.0.0.1. No database, no accounts, no hosting.
Status: Stable (1.0.1) — CLI, store, parser/model, the 24-tool MCP surface, browser preview with live reload/flows/comments, the design system (tokens, variants, drift warnings, promote_to_system), and packaging are all implemented. Artisign designs its own browser preview — see Designed with itself.
Node.js ≥ 20.19, on macOS or Linux. Windows is not supported — the store's atomic writes (write temp file, then rename) and its path handling have never been verified there, so the tool is not shipped for it. package.json declares this via os, which makes npm install refuse the platform rather than fail somewhere later.
Two ways to run it. npx artisign fetches the package on first use and needs no setup — the fastest way to try it. Installing it into a directory of your own is the other path, and the one the commands below are written for. Screenshots are not the difference between them: the two screenshot tools need Playwright, which a local install can sit next to and which the npx path reaches through ARTISIGN_PLAYWRIGHT_DIR — both routes are under Optional: screenshots below.
The commands below are written as npx artisign. With a local install, run ./node_modules/.bin/artisign instead — or npm install -g artisign and just artisign.
Canonical quickstart. The local install, from an empty directory to a connected agent. Start the daemon before registering the MCP server — the HTTP registration below runs against an already-running daemon:
The first two lines repeat the install above on purpose: the point of this block is that nothing has to be assembled from elsewhere. On the npx path, drop them and start with npx artisign start ./my-project instead — the screenshot tools then need ARTISIGN_PLAYWRIGHT_DIR, as described below.
Optional: screenshots. get_screenshot and inspect_node need a real browser, which is intentionally not bundled (npx artisign stays light without it). Playwright is an optional peer dependency — npm neither installs it nor its ~150 MB of browser binaries unless you ask for them by name. Two ways to do that:
Next to Artisign. In the directory you installed artisign into:
--no-save matters: it installs the package without writing it into package.json or the lockfile, which is the whole point of Playwright being optional. Without the flag npm edits both files; with some npm versions a plain npm install playwright even reports up to date and installs nothing, because an optional peer counts as satisfied when absent.
Anywhere, named by ARTISIGN_PLAYWRIGHT_DIR. Install Playwright once into a directory of its own and point Artisign at it:
This is the route that also works when artisign runs from npx's cache, and the one to use when the first route leaves the repo dirty. The variable has to be set for the process that runs the daemon — for a stdio MCP server, that is the env block of the host's config.
artisign imports Playwright dynamically, so without the variable Node resolves it from the tree artisign itself lives in: installing Playwright into your design project has no effect. If Playwright isn't installed, or is installed but broken (a partial copy, a symlink whose target is gone), both tools fail with the fix in the error message rather than crashing the server; every other tool works without it. A Playwright installed after the daemon started is picked up on the next call; a repaired one needs a daemon restart, and the error says so.
Register the MCP server.
Claude Desktop — stdio, add to claude_desktop_config.json:
Claude Code — stdio:
Recommended — against the running daemon (npx artisign start), streamable HTTP instead of spawning a second process. Bake the project into the URL, one stable entry per coding project:
The ?project= parameter scopes every tool call to that project (auto-opening it on first use), so several coding projects can share one daemon without ever restarting it. Without the parameter, calls go to the project currently active in the browser UI. init_project works even while no project is open.
Privacy. Artisign collects nothing — no telemetry, no account, no server beyond the local one it runs, no update check. Two things reach the network, neither of them about you: import_html fetches whatever URL you hand it, and the first render of a project fetches the font families named in your tokens — plus the Material Symbols Rounded icon font, always — from Google Fonts, then caches them locally (see Fonts & icons).
First run, in this order:
The remaining commands, for reference — this block is a catalogue, not a sequence:
artisign --help lists the flags each command accepts.
The daemon is multi-project: it runs permanently on 127.0.0.1:4711 and can hold several projects open at once. Open or create projects from the browser UI (project picker in the topbar), or let agents address any project directly via the MCP URL — no restart when you switch projects. The port comes from ~/.artisign/config.json or --port N on start and serve (a settings.port in a project's artisign.json is deprecated and ignored).
Daemon-level state — that config plus the daemon.lock holding the running pid and port — lives in ~/.artisign. Set ARTISIGN_HOME to move it somewhere else; that, together with --port, is what lets a second daemon run fully isolated from the first, which is worth doing before you try anything destructive against projects you care about.
| Bucket | Tool | Does |
|---|---|---|
| Reads | get_guide | The design methodology guide (docs/agent-guide.md), on demand. |
| Reads | get_project | Screen list, design-system pointer, counts. Tiered, cold-start read. |
| Reads | get_screen | One screen with comment/flow indicators. Tiered + field selection. |
| Reads | get_node | Subtree of one node, addressed as <screen>.<node-id>. Tiered + field selection. |
| Reads | get_design_system | Tokens, components (with variants and the default variant's slot names), and patterns. tree carries every token value, grouped by bucket. |
| Reads | find_nodes | Where-query across screens (style ref, component ref, variant, comments, text, flow). |
| Reads | list_comments | Open/resolved comments, filtered by screen or node. |
| Reads | get_mockup | A mockup's variants — raw HTML, outside the ref model. |
| Writes | write_html | Create or fully replace a screen from augmented HTML. |
| Writes | patch_html | Surgical patch by node ref or CSS selector: replace, insert, delete, set attr. |
| Writes | update_refs | Change a node's token/component/variant bindings without a full HTML parse. |
| Writes | set_tokens | Design-system token mutation — one call re-resolves every bound screen. |
| Writes | set_flow | Mutate a flow edge in flows.json without touching any screen file. |
| Writes | set_meta | Screen notes/tags, design-system idea/decisions, component/pattern usage, a tag's own notes — the handoff contract. |
| Writes | write_mockup | Create or revise one variant of a mockup — raw HTML, outside the design system. |
| Writes | set_board_state | Read or mutate the Board's shared filter and pinned screens — daemon memory only, not available over stdio. |
| Lifecycle | init_project | Scaffold a project directory: empty, from HTML, or from a Stitch export URL. |
| Lifecycle | import_html | Incremental HTML ingest into an existing project, with content-hash dedup. |
| Lifecycle | promote_to_system | Lift an inline value or a repeated element into a token, component, or pattern. |
| Lifecycle | promote_mockup | Copy a chosen mockup variant into a new, design-system-bound screen (the mockup stays). |
| Lifecycle | delete_entity | Delete a screen, component, pattern, or mockup; refuses a component still referenced by a screen. |
| Comments | reply_comment | Answer a comment and optionally resolve it. |
| Visual review | get_screenshot | Screenshots a rendered screen (or one node), or one mockup variant, as a PNG — the write → screenshot → adjust loop. |
| Visual review | inspect_node | Computed box and styles of one node as text — cheaper than vision for geometry questions. |
get_screenshot renders a screen (or, given node, crops to one element) exactly the way the browser preview does — same parse, same renderScreen — and returns a PNG, so an agent can see what a write actually produced instead of only inspecting markup. Typical use: write_html/patch_html, then get_screenshot to review, then adjust.
It needs Playwright — see the optional dependency in Install above.
scale (default 1) is the screenshot's device scale factor — 1x is enough for most visual review; go higher only when pixel-level detail matters, since a larger image costs more tokens once it reaches a model.
Screens are augmented HTML — $name in class is a component ref, $name in style values is a token ref:
What an instance contributes is exactly what it writes: the component ref picks
the definition, data-variant picks the template, its children fill the slots,
and every other attribute on the element — style, extra classes, href,
aria-*, data-flow-target — lands on the expanded root. The instance wins
over the definition on a conflict; style and class accumulate, with the
instance's declarations last so they win the inline cascade. Only the tag is
the definition's call. The example above therefore renders the hover template
with padding-inline: 16px on top of whatever the definition sets.
Everything is human-readable and diffable. With autoCommit on (the init default), every write op becomes one git commit named after the tool and its target (write_html: dashboard, set_tokens: color.primary, ...) — that is the audit log.
Served at http://127.0.0.1:<port> once the daemon is running — plain ES modules, no build step:
data-flow-target to jump to the screen it points atcomments.jsonl, picked up by list_comments / answered via reply_commentwrite_html). Every tool call also lands in the right panel's new Activity tab (last 50, in-memory, newest first) regardless of follow's own state. Human navigation — a screen/tab click, clicking an entry in the Activity feed, or opening comment/inspect mode — pauses it; only the toggle's own "Resume" un-pauses itEvery rendered surface — screens pane, Design System variants, and (later) get_screenshot — wraps the rendered fragment in the same small baseline document, so what an agent designs is what renders everywhere, pixel for pixel. The guarantee: box-sizing: border-box on every element, zero body margin, antialiased text. A screen root declared width: 390px with padding measures exactly 390px — no implicit UA margin or box-model surprise to account for.
Any font family named in design-system/tokens.json's typography bucket (e.g. "600 24px/1.2 'Plus Jakarta Sans', sans-serif") is fetched once from Google Fonts as woff2 and cached under .artisign/fonts/ — offline-first after the first serve. A fetch failure (no network, unknown family) is silent: the render falls back to the system font, it never blocks.
Icons are Material Symbols Rounded, always cached alongside your typography fonts, used via ligature names:
Never substitute a Unicode glyph for an icon — the .icon class and the ligature name are what make the rendered result deterministic.
Drop a local image into a project's assets/ folder (subfolders are fine) and reference it as a project-relative path, assets/<path>, in an src attribute or a CSS url():
The reference stays portable in the source file. At render time it resolves two ways, the same split webfonts use: a page loaded over HTTP (the preview iframe, /api/render/*) gets it rewritten to /api/assets/<path>?project=<path> unconditionally, tagged with the project it was rendered from so a subresource request out of an iframe's srcdoc still resolves against the right project even with several open at once — a path that doesn't resolve to a file under assets/ still gets the URL, and 404s there, rather than being checked against the filesystem twice; a headless render with no HTTP base URL (get_screenshot, inspect_node) gets it inlined as a data: URI instead, and there an unresolvable path is left as-is. Either way, the browser's own broken-image handling makes the problem visible rather than the image silently vanishing.
Artisign's own browser preview is designed in Artisign. design/ is a real
project in the on-disk format described above — tokens, components, screens, flows — and
it is the source the interface you see at 127.0.0.1:4711 was designed from.
Every token that has a counterpart in the shipped src/preview/style.css :root block —
all 19 colours, the six spacing steps, radius.pill and shadow.menu — mirrors it by value
and by role name, so those cannot quietly drift apart: change one and the mismatch is
visible in the other. The typography scale and radius.sm/radius.md have no custom
property behind them, so they are design decisions rather than a mirror. Values with no
counterpart at all stay literal rather than implying a binding that does not exist. Open it
the same way as any other project:
That makes it the largest worked example in the repo, and the honest answer to whether the tool is good enough to build with — it built this one.
Only dist/, src/preview/ (minus its test files), assets/ and the two guide documents in docs/ ship in the published package — see files in package.json. prepack runs the build automatically before npm pack/npm publish, so the tarball can't ship a stale dist/.
| What | Where |
|---|---|
Design methodology for agents (normative, served by get_guide) | docs/agent-guide.md |
| The same workflow long-form, for humans and skill authors | docs/design-workflow-tutorial.md |
| The tool's own UI, designed with the tool | design/ — see Designed with itself |
Bug reports, feature ideas and questions go to the
issue tracker — pick the matching
template. Vulnerabilities go through private reporting instead, never a public
issue: see SECURITY.md. Code contributions are currently not
accepted; CONTRIBUTING.md explains why and what is welcome.
Copyright (C) 2026 Christian Körbs
Artisign is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, version 3.
Artisign is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License along
with this program. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/. The full text is
in LICENSE.
Two things the license does not cover: