Design intelligence for AI agents. 10 brand extractions that encode the decisions a creative director would make — not just colors and fonts, but judgment, philosophy, and anti-patterns.
A taste file is a new category of design artifact for the AI era.
Traditional design systems answer: "What are our components?" Taste files answer: "What would our creative director decide?"
Paste a taste file into Claude, Cursor, GPT, or any AI coding agent. Instead of generic output, you get designs that feel like the brand — because the AI understands not just what to do, but why.
| Brand | Aesthetic | Best For |
|---|---|---|
| Anthropic | Warm pastels, hand-drawn illustrations, human-centered AI | AI products, research orgs, trust-building |
| Linear | Dark-mode precision, dense layouts, maker tools | Developer tools, productivity software |
| McDonald's | Golden arches, bold warmth, universal simplicity | Consumer products, global brands |
| Nothing | Dot-matrix retro-futurism, transparent hardware | Hardware brands, challenger products |
| Notion | Radical blank-canvas simplicity, content-first | Knowledge tools, writing apps |
| Oatly | Hand-drawn zine energy, packaging as manifesto | Challenger brands, D2C, sustainability |
| Off-White | Deconstructed typography, industrial quotation marks | Creative tools, fashion, galleries |
| Stripe | Premium gradients, developer-first polish | Fintech, APIs, developer platforms |
| Vercel | Monochrome geometry, performance as aesthetic | Infrastructure, deployment, dev tools |
| Wise | Acid green, global 3D, anti-bank energy | Fintech, global platforms, mobile-first |
Copy the contents of a brand's taste.md and paste it into your AI agent's context:
You are building a [product type].
[paste taste.md contents here]
Build me a [landing page / dashboard / settings panel / etc.]
Each taste file ends with an Application Directive — a condensed prompt you can paste directly:
"Apply the Linear aesthetic.
Use a near-black background with subtle surface elevation..."
Taste files encode principles, not prescriptions. You can:
- Use one file as your primary aesthetic and borrow composition rules from another
- Apply a brand's anti-patterns as a checklist for your own work
- Study the emotional direction section to understand why a design works
brand-name/
taste.md # The full 8-section taste file
Each taste file follows 8 sections:
- Essence — The soul in one paragraph
- Art Direction — Personality + design philosophy
- Visual DNA — Colors, typography, layout, imagery, motion, texture, interaction
- Composition Rules — How elements relate
- Anti-Patterns — What breaks it
- Emotional Direction — How it should feel
- Context Fit — Where it belongs
- Signature Phrase — The bumper sticker
These taste files were created through systematic design extraction — studying each brand's digital presence, reverse-engineering decisions, identifying anti-patterns, and calibrating emotional territory.
Read METHODOLOGY.md for a detailed explanation of our extraction process.
CC BY 4.0 — use them freely, commercially, with attribution. See LICENSE.
These 10 files demonstrate our methodology. The real value is extracting your brand's design DNA — the internal decisions, the tribal knowledge, the unwritten rules.
dupe.la — Design intelligence for the AI era.