Inspiration skills

Agent skills that make your coding agent design from real references instead of defaults. They run on the hosted MCP server of Inspiration by VASA.Works, a searchable, described and tagged library of design work: website sections and full-site styles, UI and product screens, slide decks, branding and brand guidelines, fonts, color palettes, editorial and print, illustration, motion, photography, mockups, data visualization, OG images and emails.

The skills

The art-direction skill ships a small real-browser inspector (scripts/inspect.mjs) that captures full-page screenshots at desktop and mobile widths and reports fonts actually rendered, colors, heading sizes, line length, horizontal overflow, missing alt text and low-contrast text.

Requirements

• All skills: an MCP-capable agent connected to the Inspiration MCP server (the plugin does this for you; other clients below). A free account works: 50 metered tool calls per month, and each skill keeps a run to about 5 to 12 of them.
• Image fallback (only when the server cannot return images): curl, plus ImageMagick (magick, or convert on ImageMagick 6) to convert and crop. Without ImageMagick the skills use sips on macOS or open the downloaded webp directly.
• Inspector (art-direction only, optional): Node 22+, playwright-core and a Chrome or Chromium. npx -y -p playwright-core@1.63.0 node skills/inspiration-art-direction/scripts/inspect.mjs ./index.html runs it without adding a dependency to your project, but npx downloads playwright-core into its cache on the first run. For the browser it uses INSPECT_CHROME=/path/to/chrome, your installed Chrome, or a Playwright Chromium; with none of those, run npx -y playwright@1.63.0 install chromium once. Output goes to .inspiration-out/, which the skills add to your .gitignore if the project has one. Agents with their own browser or screenshot tool can skip it.

Install

Claude Code (plugin, recommended)

The plugin installs all three skills and registers the MCP server for you.

/plugin marketplace add huseyingayiran/inspiration-skills
/plugin install inspiration@vasa-works

Then run /mcp, pick plugin:inspiration:inspiration (or inspiration if you added it by hand), and sign in in the browser. Free and Pro accounts both work.

Cursor, Codex and other agents

Install the skills:

npx skills add huseyingayiran/inspiration-skills

Then connect the MCP server for your client (below). You can also install a single skill; each one is self-contained.

Connect the MCP server

Server URL: https://mcp.vasa.works/mcp (streamable HTTP). Clients with OAuth sign you in through the browser. Key-based clients use the API key from your account page.

Claude Code (only if you skipped the plugin):

claude mcp add --transport http inspiration https://mcp.vasa.works/mcp

Then /mcp, pick inspiration, sign in.

Cursor (~/.cursor/mcp.json or .cursor/mcp.json):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "inspiration": {
      "url": "https://mcp.vasa.works/mcp",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" }
    }
  }
}

Codex (~/.codex/config.toml):

[mcp_servers.inspiration]
url = "https://mcp.vasa.works/mcp"
bearer_token_env_var = "INSPIRATION_API_KEY"

Set INSPIRATION_API_KEY to your key, or leave the line out and run codex mcp login inspiration for OAuth.

Claude.ai and Claude Desktop: Settings, Connectors, add a custom connector with https://mcp.vasa.works/mcp, approve the sign-in.

ChatGPT: Settings, Apps and Connectors, create a connector with https://mcp.vasa.works/mcp and OAuth, sign in, enable it in a chat.

Free and Pro

Connecting is free. A free account includes 50 metered tool calls per UTC month; browsing the vocabulary (list_facets) does not count. A full art-direction run is budgeted at about 12 calls. Pro is unlimited. See pricing. When the free calls run out, the skills say so and finish with what they already have.

Example prompts

• "Design a landing page for our open-source observability tool. Make it feel editorial, not like a template."
• "Art direct the homepage of my ceramics studio, then build it in this Next.js app."
• "This pricing page looks generic. Find references and redo it."
• "Make a brand kit from #1F6F5C for a calm fintech app, with a font pairing."
• "Show me dark SaaS heroes with oversized serif type and compare the three best."
• "Find more like this one and save the set to a board called Q3 relaunch."

Never copy

The skills take principles, not pixels. Every reference the art-direction skill keeps is written up with what it borrows and what it deliberately leaves behind. They never lift a layout wholesale, and never reuse a reference's copy, images, logos or licensed typefaces. References are only described from images the agent actually viewed.

Files

.claude-plugin/plugin.json        plugin manifest
.claude-plugin/marketplace.json   marketplace "vasa-works" listing the plugin
.mcp.json                         registers the inspiration MCP server
skills/inspiration-art-direction/ SKILL.md, references/, scripts/inspect.mjs
skills/inspiration-brand-kit/     SKILL.md, references/
skills/inspiration-references/    SKILL.md, references/
evals/                            claude plugin eval suite (see evals/README.md)
CHANGELOG.md                      release notes; every SKILL.md carries the same metadata.version

references/setup.md and references/library-rules.md are identical in every skill on purpose, so each skill also works when installed on its own.

License

MIT, see LICENSE. Copyright 2026 VASA Works ltd. The skills are open source; the design library and MCP server are a service of Inspiration by VASA.Works.