# How our agents build on-brand pages with design.md

DevFeed: [How our agents build on-brand pages with design.md](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/how-our-agents-build-on-brand-pages-with-design-md-746.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://vercel.com/blog/how-our-agents-build-on-brand-pages-with-design-md>)

Author: John Phamous

Published: 2026-08-31T04:00:00Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [Vercel News](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/vercel-news.md>)

Topics: [AI Bots](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/ai-bots.md>)

Tags: [agents](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/agents.md>), [coding](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/coding.md>), [design](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/design.md>), [information-architecture](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/information-architecture.md>), [tools](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/tools.md>), [vercel](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/vercel.md>)

## AI overview

Vercel describes design.md, a public file that gives coding agents design-system and product guidance for creating on-brand pages outside its codebases.

## Source excerpt

Across Vercel, we use coding agents to design and build pages that have to look and feel like Vercel. The typography, color, and composition all need to carry the same judgment that we put into the pages we already ship ourselves. We recently wrote about product-design, our skill that teaches agents how we design when they work in our codebases. The skill lives in each repository alongside the code that it governs, explaining how agents can find and understand our design system as well as product guidelines for whatever they are building. This works great when agents are working in our codebases, where everything the skill needs is right there. But what about reports, proposals, and the one-off pages that still have to look like Vercel but get made in tools that can't read any of those files? For us, the answer was design.md, one public file any agent can load. How we approached building design.md What made product-design work well was that the design system and product guidelines were sitting right there in the repository for agents to read. We needed a way for agents and tools outside that environment to reach the same knowledge, so that the pages coming out the other end would still look like something we designed ourselves. That set two requirements: A single public URL that anyone can point their agents at, regardless of the environment they run in. Guidance covering everything that made product-design useful in the first place, from brand, layout, and copywriting to the design system, responsiveness, and information architecture. The naive approach we tried first was to simply port product-design into a public prompt, collapsing the skill's reference files into one file any agent could read from a URL. The problem we found was that while the prompt described our visual language just fine, every model reading it interpreted that description differently, generating vastly different pages from the same guidance. Part of this comes from the fact that design langua