The AI-Native Design Format

Open standard that unlocks design at machine speed

Design tools today are walled gardens. Figma, Sketch, Adobe XD—each guards its proprietary formats, locking creative work into ecosystems that resist interoperability. Open design format (ODF) changes this equation entirely.

The AI Advantage

Traditional design tools require extensive API calls to manipulate properties one at a time—prohibitively slow when generating multiple variations. Open design format solves this through structured data exchange: an AI agent generates complete JSON specifications, sends them a design endpoint, and sees rendered UI in seconds. Creating ten alternative layouts exploring different spacing, colors, and typography becomes a matter of seconds rather than minutes

How It Works

Open design format provides a declarative design language mapping directly to UI primitives. A button component looks like this:

json
{
  “type”: “AutoLayout”,
  “props”: {
    “direction”: “horizontal”,
    “padding”: {”top”: 8, “right”: 16, “bottom”: 8, “left”: 16},
    “fill”: “#007AFF”,
    “cornerRadius”: 6
  },
  “children”: [{
    “type”: “Text”,
    “props”: {”fontSize”: 14, “fill”: “#FFFFFF”, “fontWeight”: “500”},
    “children”: “Click Me”
  }]
}

Every property is explicit. Every structure is inspectable. Every component can be programmatically generated or modified. This makes it ideal for AI workflows where systems rapidly create variations and iterate on design decisions. An AI can generate ten variations in seconds. AI systems can now create, modify, and iterate on designs at machine speed. Exploiting its natural strength in variation creation while maintaining structural consistency.

Technical Innovation

ODF bridges the declarative simplicity of web development with the visual richness of design tools. Through WebSocket architecture and the Model Context Protocol, AI agents communicate directly with design applications, creating a real-time feedback loop. The format supports everything needed for sophisticated design systems: typography controls, auto-layout, gradients, shadows, and complex hierarchies—all validated through schemas that ensure semantic correctness. Assets such as images and vector files are elegantly placed along side Open design format json files. Important when AI’s has limited Token context to consume. Assets are piped outside LLMs The json just refers to them as local, remote or even as blobs if size isn’t a concern.

The bidirectional nature is key. AI doesn’t just generate static files; it observes results, iterates based on context, and refines designs in real-time. This isn’t about AI as an assistant—it’s AI as a true design partner, understanding and manipulating design at a structural level. This JSON-in-JSON-out workflow is orders of magnitude faster than sequential API calls for the 80% use case of layout, styling, and component assembly.

The Open Imperative

The choice between open and closed formats is philosophical. Closed formats create moats, forcing ecosystem lock-in and slowing innovation. ODF represents a different path—design assets as portable as text files, as queryable as databases, as versionable as code.

When design becomes truly open—readable by any system, modifiable by any tool, understandable by both humans and machines—we unlock unimagined possibilities. Design components could evolve like open-source libraries. AI systems could learn from the entire corpus of human design work, not just fragments exposed through APIs.

This is ODF’s promise: not just encoding designs differently, but enabling the next era of human-AI creative collaboration. By choosing transparency over protection and interoperability over lock-in, Open design format charts a course toward a future where the best idea wins—regardless of which tool created it.

Building the Future

The emergence of AI-powered design tools marks a transformation as significant as the shift from print to digital. This transformation requires infrastructure that enables rather than constrains. Open design format makes design data accessible, portable, and programmable—inviting participation rather than demanding allegiance.

Every proprietary format that falls. Every closed ecosystem that opens. Every AI tool that gains direct access to design structures. These are steps toward a more innovative, more creative, and more collaborative future for design. The tools we build today shape the possibilities available tomorrow. Open design format chooses openness, because innovation demands it.

Open design format is an open specification for declarative design. Technical documentation available for developers building compatible tools or integrating AI agents with design workflows. https://gist.github.com/eonist/e147f217f8dd56ee46792d0e1136de11