Ask any LLM to "make this landing page look like a high-end Swiss design studio" and you'll get something that gestures at the idea — a sans-serif font, some whitespace, maybe a red accent because it half-remembers Müller-Brockmann. It looks AI-generated because it is. The model has read a billion words about design but has no grounded, reusable representation of what "Swiss International Style" actually specifies: the exact grid, the type scale, the spacing ramp, the rules for what you must not do.
That gap is the whole problem. Models are great at language and bad at design systems, because a design system isn't language — it's a set of constrained values plus the discipline to apply them consistently. So I built the missing piece: a library of real design styles, turned into something a machine can actually consume.
It's called Curio. This post is about the part I think is interesting to other builders: making design machine-readable, and publishing the catalog for agents instead of for humans.
A design style is just tokens + rules
The insight is boring and that's why it works. Pick any coherent visual language — Bauhaus, Memphis, the Edo woodblock palette, Stripe's product aesthetic — and you can decompose it into:
