How to Copy Any Website's Design Style with AI
You've found a product that looks exactly like what you want to build. Here's how to reverse engineer that design and get your AI coding tool to build toward it.
Every vibe coder has this moment. You're looking at Linear, or Vercel, or Stripe, or some indie tool someone posted — and it looks exactly like what your product should be. Considered, distinctive, nothing generic about it.
The gap between “I like this” and “my app looks like this” is a design spec. Here's how to build one.
Breaking it down manually
To copy website design with AI, you need to translate what you're seeing into explicit decisions your AI tool can follow. Four things matter most:
Colors. Background, surface, text, accent. Most products you'd want to reference are built on 3–5 colors used consistently. Get the exact hex values — browser dev tools or a color picker extension makes this a two-minute job.
Type. The font (or a close match), the size hierarchy, and the weight pattern. Heavy heading with light body is a common premium pattern. How the type is set tells you more about a design's personality than almost anything else.
Component language. Rounded or sharp corners? Bordered or borderless cards? Shadows or flat? This is the shorthand that makes products visually recognizable. You know you're looking at a Vercel-ish product before you read a word of the copy.
Spacing. Generous or tight? Premium products almost always err toward generous. The spacing is often what separates a product that feels high-end from one that just has good colors.
Write those four things down and you have a working design spec. Put it in a SKILL.md, add it to your Claude project instructions or Cursor rules, and your AI builds toward that visual target.
This isn't plagiarism — design language isn't copyrightable and taking visual inspiration from products you admire is how design has always worked. You're borrowing the approach, not the content.
The shortcut
Doing this manually takes practice. The Design Extractor takes a screenshot and does it automatically — analyzing the design and outputting a skill file ready to use in any AI coding tool.
It's the most direct way to copy app design style into a format your AI can follow. Upload a screenshot of whatever design you want to match and get a complete reverse engineer ui design output in minutes.
Try the Design Extractor (Pro) →