Design Rails
Get an agent-ready brand in minutes
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Garry Tan

Design Rails - Get an agent-ready brand in minutes

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Y Combinator
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Chat with an AI creative director. Get a complete brand identity in minutes—logo, colors, typography, voice & tone, UI styles—all packaged as agent-ready files. No more generic UI. Drop the files into your project, and tools like Claude and Lovable generate on-brand UI from day one.

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Ehud Halberstam
Maker
📌

Big thanks for the launch lift, YC & @garrytan!

Hey Product Hunt 👋,

Here's the backstory - last year, we needed a new brand for a product we had built quickly and were going to ship within days. We couldn't justify paying thousands of $'s on a brand before PMF, nor could we afford waiting weeks for the full design cycle.

Plus, we wanted more than a visual reference in Figma, or a homepage template. We needed a design system that we could handoff to agents to carry the brand consistently across app workflows, and marketing channels. It needed to include UI styles, voice & tone guidelines, a logo and logo derivatives that'll work well for a favicon, and light and dark themes.

We talked with other builders who were in the same boat and realized this was a common problem. So, we built Design Rails.

Looking forward to hearing how it works for you, and happy to answer any questions!

Piroune Balachandran

@garrytan  @ehudhal When I'm in a tight MVP sprint, the agent starts freelancing, new spacing, new radii, slightly different blues. Design Rails shipping a design-context folder with agent-instructions.md and W3C design-tokens.json is the kind of handoff that actually works. Do you also generate CSS variables or a Tailwind theme from the tokens so the app and landing page don't drift apart? That last mile is where brand kits usually fall apart.

Ehud Halberstam
Maker

@piroune_balachandran Design Rails generates markdown files with usage instructions and examples including CSS snippets, and a structured design tokens json file. The design tokens format was designed to be stack agnostic, and you can instruct your coding agent to use it to create a tailwind (or other frameworks) files from it.
Check out Style Dictionary for a non-AI library to convert design tokens to different formats: https://styledictionary.com/examples/basic/

Kimberly Ross

@ehudhal Congrats. Can I swap campaign variables while preserving brand identity? And can one brand system generate assets for multiple channels?

Ehud Halberstam
Maker

@kimberly_ross Thanks! What's an example of campaign variables you'd like to swap?
Design Rails generates design system - colors, typography, UI element styles, voice & tone, logos - are these the type of assets you're thinking about for different channels? Or are you looking for branded social content?

Mahesh Yadav

@garrytan  @ehudhal Hi Ehud - this hits a real early stage pain. Paying for a full brand before PMF rarely makes sense, but shipping without a consistent system creates chaos later.

Design Rails feels practical, especially if it covers UI, voice, and agent ready guidelines, not just visuals.

I’m building Ahsk, a macOS AI assistant focused on helping founders execute faster. Would love to connect and exchange feedback.

Timo Philip Burmeister
Just tried it. Hoped to have a good alternative to fiverr when it comes to logo design. The flow is very intuitive and also the color selection was a good fit for my test company. I really like that I get the files to throw them directly into Claude. Still a big BUT: the generated logos do not look professional. Sorry to say but it’s like using any out of the box AI to get a logo. Very generic - 0 creative.
Ehud Halberstam
Maker

@t1m0slav Thanks for giving it a try, and for the feedback!

The logos are a fun problem :) If you gave a thumbs down to those that weren't helpful that'll help us look into the specifics and tune it up further. Or, if you're open to sending over the thread ID (URL) over to hello@designrails.com that would be much appreciated.

In many of the runs, we've been blown away by the creativity the AI achieves (looking at you, nano banana) in capturing concepts, and reflecting the desired style. It fails at times, and there's more work to do! What often works well is going beyond the single-shot, asking for (free) variations and steering it with revision guidance to hone-in on the concept you have in mind.

Mykola Kondratiuk

This is exactly the gap I keep hitting. I use Lovable and Claude for most of my projects and every time the AI just picks its own design system. Ends up looking like every other vibe coded app. Curious how the agent-ready files work in practice - is it like a system prompt the AI reads, or actual CSS/token files it imports?

Ehud Halberstam
Maker

@mykola_kondratiuk The files are markdown with semantic annotation and usage examples. Plus a JSON file for design tokens that's more structured and can be used to translate (programmatically via Style Dictionary, or by the LLM) to different file formats. Plus logo files in PNG and SVGs.
You can download a sample (simplified version) here: https://designrails.com/brand-books#sample-package

Sam Alexander

Why are you lying about being backed by YC?

Ehud Halberstam
Maker

Hi @sam_alexander1 Design Rails is the name of the product. Company is Chordio. https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/chordio

Sam Alexander

@ehudhal bit misleading tbh

Jan Schutte

Hi, really like the idea. When you're trying a lot of things it can be expensive to get designers for everything. A workflow where you can generate a cohesive design before going into building the app sounds smart. If you're selling to developers tho you really need to have better (logo)designs than what they can already create using claude or codex.

Piroune Balachandran

Good bet on Style Dictionary. DTCG going stable means those tokens port to Figma Variables without a custom transform.

Mykyta Semenov 🇺🇦🇳🇱

Congratulations on the launch! Can I provide your AI with style examples so it can create a similar design? Directly as an image.

Ehud Halberstam
Maker

@mykyta_semenov_ Thanks! You can't provide a reference image directly just yet.

Vasiliy Bobrenkov

I liked onboarding and user flow, but logos are very generic. Hope improve it soon

Ehud Halberstam
Maker

@vasilbo thanks for checking it out and for the feedback. 🙌

Curious Kitty
If someone already has a partial brand or an existing product UI, what’s the recommended adoption path—do you recreate from scratch, extract and normalize into tokens, or incrementally refactor—and how long does it typically take to get to a stable system?
Ehud Halberstam
Maker

@curiouskitty- that's pretty much the process. You provide the partial brand (e.g. hex values, typography, visual concepts) as an input to give an initial direction, and you get a more complete brand system. If we define "stable system" as "the UI I'm building doesn't look generic and the AI consistently follows the brand guidelines" - once you're happy with the brand and add the exported package as design context, the LLM picks it up immediately and does a really good job following it.

Rohith J

Congrats on the launch, Team! 🚀

Love the idea - getting a full, agent-ready brand in minutes is super practical.

Ehud Halberstam
Maker

@rohithreddy Thanks, Rohith!

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