I flew to Barcelona alone last week to set up the apartment before my girlfriend and son arrived.

I spent a lot of time just walking. 

Through the l'Eixample district, in shorts, weaving in and out of the shadows of stunning buildings that have stood there for centuries.

It was hot, so I ducked into a coffee shop and ordered a cold brew. It was literally the best cold brew I've had in my life.

I stood there sipping it, looking up at this beautiful building some stranger had carved a hundred years ago, and I felt happy. 

Physically. Like the bricks themselves had lifted my mood.

That's what good design does for the soul. 

And it travels well past architecture. 

The chair you sit on, or the bedroom you sleep in, the app you open every morning, or the landing page where someone first meets your product. 

When something is made with care, you instinctively feel it in your body. 

When it's made without care, you feel that too. You just call it "off" or "cheap" and click away.

So if you're shipping things into the world (products, websites, courses, software), your design does just as much work as the thing itself. Especially today, when few people put in the effort to produce something beautiful. 

Bad design has been the default for decades, and AI hasn't really changed that. 

People assumed Claude or ChatGPT would close the gap. I'll describe what I want and it'll come back beautiful. 

But that’s not really how it’s played out. Everyone just ended up with the same tacky-looking websites, with very basic vibecode. 

First of all, because the average joe sucks at describing quality design.

Secondly, AI doesn't have taste of its own. 

So without a reference to point at, it gives you the average of everything it's seen. Aka slop.

Which leaves us non-designers (that's me) stuck with the same two options we had before AI showed up:

But there's a third option I started recently using, and it's almost embarrassing how easy it is to produce something tasteful.

The trick is to stop asking AI to be a designer and start asking it to be a copyist. 

The whole skill is in choosing what to point your AI at.

Pick a brand whose design you already love, hand its design system to your AI, and tell it to build in that style as the foundation.

You become a curator with taste, which is the most useful skill to have in the AI era anyway.

The tool is styles.refero.design (not sponsored, it's just genuinely free and great).

You can do one of two things on it:

Either way, you get back a single file called a design.md.

It’s like a brand’s visual DNA: a file that lets you clone their design into your own projects.

That file contains everything: colors, font stack, type scale, spacing, button style, etc. 

Basically the entire visual identity of that brand, written in plain English that Claude or ChatGPT can read.

Then here's the whole flow:

From that point on, every page and screen it generates inherits that taste. 

I'm a huge Obsidian nerd, and their site has a clean, minimal, slightly nerdy energy that I love.

So I grabbed Obsidian's design.md, opened it in Claude, and used it as the foundation for the landing page of my new product.

Then I iterated on top of it: pushed the type a little bigger, changed the font to one I like, edited the spacing, added some colors and design elements that felt more like me, etc

The result is live here: marketing-os-deploy.vercel.app

Expert designers reading this will probably spot things they'd do differently (and they're probably right tbh).

But that’s not the point.

The point is this page would have been impossible for me to make a year ago. 

I built this in an hour with Claude Code and a design.md, for free. 

Hiring someone to build this used to cost me $1.5-3k and weeks of back-and-forth.

And the cool part is once you have a design.md you love, it's portable.

You can take that same file, drop it into a totally different project next week:

and everything you ship from then on out will feel like it came from the same product family. 

Your taste compounds across every build instead of starting from zero every time.

Which means a little more beauty getting shipped into the world, with way less friction.

Unfortunately, beauty did not get shipped into my Barcelona apartment.

When I walked in the first thing I saw was a burned floor.

I had 12 hours to find another place before my family flew in. It was impossible. So I flew back to Berlin and we extended our contract another 4 weeks.

In hindsight that's been way more relaxed, especially for the baby.

Now my next stop is San Francisco, where Google invited me to their Google I/O event (if you’re in the bay hit me up!)

It'll be the first time I'm away from my son for 6 days. 

Even just thinking about it already feels weird, a feeling I've genuinely never had before.

There's something fulfilling just being at home with my small family instead of always on the go.

See you next week,

Ole

P.S. This design.md workflow in this email is a free preview. Inside the Claude Cowork Marketing OS you get 21 skills like it, ready to install.

Stuff like my copywriting system, landing page builder, email engine, and the content workflows I run my whole business on. 

Plus video walkthroughs and hands-on exercises so a non-technical person can install it without writing a line of code.

Grab it for $149 here.