Designer Kit overview

The Designer Kit is the visual half of the Forge. It shares the CLI, identity, and marketplace with the Developer Kit — and ships design templates, themes, section libraries, ready-made collections, plus seven specialty packs (icons, motion, chrome, backgrounds, email, microcopy, imagery).

The kit is designed to be driven by a desktop AI agent (Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, Codex). The kit folder ships a CLAUDE.md at its root; the agent reads it on its own and learns what to do. You can also drive the same flow manually with the CLI if you prefer.

What people build on Vincia

Two archetypes, with three flavours when you count the customer-accounts variant of a website:

• Website — a public marketing or content site. The site owner has a sign-in to manage forms, data, and content; visitors browse without an account. Required pages: home, about, contact.
• Website with customer accounts — public site plus a sign-in-gated area for customers. Same brand, two audiences. Adds login, signup, password-reset, and a customer dashboard.
• Portal — every page sits behind a sign-in. Internal tools, member portals, dashboards. Required pages: login, dashboard, settings.

Every template you ship declares which archetype it targets. The kit unlocks the right page set automatically.

What you can ship

Foundation pieces (scaffold available today)

• Design template — a full multi-page layout wired to widgets and a theme. Most common starting point.
• Theme pack — color, typography, and spacing tokens that re-skin any template.
• Section library — pre-composed page sections (heroes, feature grids, testimonials, pricing tables) grouped by purpose.
• Ready-made collection — seeded data + schema, a "ready-to-brand" example bundle for a specific use case.

Scaffold any of them with vincia create <type> <name> (e.g. vincia create design-template my-newsletter).

Specialty packs

Seven extend the foundations along one axis each: icon pack, motion pack, chrome pack, background pack, email template pack, microcopy voice pack, imagery treatment pack. Documented and importable today; the dedicated scaffold command is rolling out.

Three ways your work pays off

• Open-source — ship free; every install grows your reputation and shows on your contributor profile.
• Monetize — recurring earnings on every install. Design templates earn directly (default $1 / recipient / month, or set your own price); themes, section libraries, and specialty packs aren't paid standalone but make templates and solution packs cheaper to build.
• Freelance — build for one specific client. Your template lives in your team's private library, not the public catalog. Promote to public later if you want marketplace earnings on top.

Easiest start: open the kit in your AI agent

1. Download the Designer Kit zip and unzip it. 2. Open the folder in Claude Desktop (Settings → Projects → Add a project → pick the kit folder), Claude Code, Cursor, or Codex. 3. Tell the agent what you want to ship in plain English.

On first use the agent installs the Vincia CLI for you and signs you in; then it asks the brand and product questions, scaffolds the template, opens the preview, applies your feedback, and publishes. You stay in chat — it handles the terminal.

Or use the CLI directly

vincia create design-template my-template --build-type website
vincia create theme my-theme
vincia create section-library my-sections
vincia create ready-made-collection my-collection

Then:

cd my-template
vincia preview        # local preview server
vincia publish        # submit to the marketplace

vincia preview renders your template against multiple brand fingerprints and breakpoints so you can sanity-check it before publishing.

What gets reviewed

• Visual quality across breakpoints
• Accessibility (WCAG AA minimum)
• Slot completeness — every text node uses {{SLOT}}, every image uses {{photo:slot}}, every slot is declared in the manifest
• Token-vocabulary compliance — colors live in :root as CSS custom properties, not hard-coded hex
• Brand-fit declaration honesty
• The template renders correctly with each registered widget kind that fits its slots

Next steps

• Browse the foundation pieces for what each one is for.
• Read a guide: theme pack, design template, section library, ready-made collection.
• See design assets for what other designers have already shipped.