OpenDesign

OpenDesign is a collaborative design-agent workspace for turning a brief into a prototype, slide deck, image or motion graphic. It suits designers, developers and teams that want an editable project and repeatable design direction rather than a single finished screenshot.

Projects and generation

Organize recent projects, reusable design systems, plugins, skills and templates. The Studio combines a conversation with a live preview and generated artifacts. Filesystem-backed CLI agents can write canonical project files; a plain API workflow instead returns an artifact for the preview. Supported coding-agent adapters and MCP integration can connect the workspace to an existing coding workflow.

Bring a compatible provider endpoint and API key or use the publisher's hosted model service. The README documents OpenAI-compatible providers and local endpoints such as Ollama or LM Studio, but each provider has its own models, requirements and prices. Image and video workflows can involve separate media providers and rendering tools. Installing the desktop app does not install every external coding agent, model or project SDK.

Installation and platform

Download the official desktop DMG and copy the app into Applications, or use brew install --cask open-design. The checked 0.24.1 Apple silicon download is 400,755,598 bytes. The publisher offers separate Apple silicon and Intel downloads; this checked arm64 artifact should not be called Universal. Homebrew declares macOS 12 or later. The actual current bundle minimum and executable slices have not been independently inspected, so that cask requirement is not presented as an artifact finding.

No additional formula dependency is declared by the cask. Source development and optional rendering tools have separate setup instructions. For shell MCP setup, use the app's Settings snippet or the full installed command path: macOS already has an unrelated /usr/bin/od utility, which can win on PATH.

Permissions and accounts

A filesystem agent or plugin can read and write project files and execute approved tools. Choose a working directory, inspect plugin capabilities and review commands and changes before granting access. Protected folders and cross-application automation can require the corresponding macOS permission; basic design work does not require blanket access to every privacy category.

The hosted service requires sign-in and network access. Bring-your-own-key providers use their own credentials and billing; local model servers require their own installation and hardware. Provider endpoints are guarded against private-address access by default, and explicitly allowing an internal host is a trust decision. Do not expose credentials in a shared project, export or bug report.

License, costs and privacy

The project is Apache-2.0 open source. Bundled templates and skills with their own license files retain those licenses. Hosted model subscriptions, API requests, generated media and third-party agents can cost money independently of the source license. The current publisher promotes a discounted first month of its Go plan; introductory pricing and bonus credits are not permanent unlimited usage.

Local-first does not mean every workflow is offline. Requests to a remote model or media provider can transmit prompts, project context and files. The publisher distinguishes consent-gated product analytics and session replay from always-on scrubbed reliability and safety telemetry. Diagnostics can include daemon health and execution information; review exported bundles before sharing them. Generated UI, code and media need human review for accessibility, correctness and rights to the source material.

Sources: Publisher website, Official repository and README, Official releases.