Sources and credits
This is an unofficial community guide, compiled from public material on open-design.ai plus notes taken while running the tool. The product moves fast; where this book and the official documentation disagree, believe the official documentation.
How this book relates to the official tutorial
The spine of this book, the deck workshop, is based on the official How to Create an AI-Powered PPT with OpenDesign.
It's a rewrite rather than a reproduction. The ten-step frame and the problem each step solves come from the official tutorial; the prompts here are reorganised with additional constraints, and the reasoning, acceptance lists, and failure modes at each step come from running it. The original is worth reading directly.
The other chapters — Get started, Go deeper, Playbooks, Reference — are organised from the official documentation and public tutorials and don't map to any single source.
Principal sources
Official site
| Page | Used for |
|---|---|
| How to Create an AI-Powered PPT | The whole deck workshop |
| Quickstart | Install, requirements, troubleshooting |
| Download | Desktop builds and system requirements |
| Agents | The 21 adapters and their credentials |
| Craft | The 12 rendering principles |
| Plugins | Templates, skills, systems |
| FAQ | Common questions |
| Pricing · pricing.md | Plans and billing |
| Official source page | Project identity, aliases, licence |
| Solutions / Slides | The deck workflow |
| Solutions / HTML to PPT | PPTX export |
| llms.txt | Project positioning and canonical links |
Community material in the official tutorials section
The site's Tutorials section collects hands-on write-ups by community authors. Two informed this book:
- Skills, Design Systems, and Anti-Slop Guardrails Explained (based on Popular AI Tools' breakdown) — how skills and design systems are structured, the discovery form, the self-critique gate, and the anti-slop machinery.
- Full Capability Tour (based on 硅基麻辣拌's walkthrough) — sketch input, code-driven motion, video, the desktop pet, and the "no API key exposure" property.
Code and community
- Repository: github.com/nexu-io/open-design
- Releases: github.com/nexu-io/open-design/releases
- Issues: github.com/nexu-io/open-design/issues
- Discord: discord.gg/mHAjSMV6gz
Version at the time of writing
| Latest stable | v0.21.1 (2026-08-31) |
| Agent adapters | 21 (the official FAQ says 17 in one place) |
| Plugins | 479+ (292 templates · 23 skills · 152 systems) |
| Craft principles | 12 |
| Contributors | 409 |
| Licence | Apache-2.0 |
| Maintainer | Powerformer, Inc. |
These move. Check the site for current figures.
Conventions in this book
- Interface terms are kept verbatim. Anything you need to find on screen appears exactly as it does there.
- Prompts sit in ```text blocks so they copy cleanly.
- Claims are traceable to a source. Product limitations are marked with
::: warning. - Numbers carry their date. Anything that moves is labelled "at the time of writing".
- Three languages. Simplified Chinese is the single hand-written source, Traditional Chinese is generated from it via OpenCC s2twp, and the English is written independently.
On accuracy
Every factual claim traces to a source above. Two caveats:
One: the judgement calls are the author's. Specific advice like "not a chart on every slide" or "two to four images in a 10-to-15-slide deck" comes from running it, not from official guidance. Your situation may differ.
Two: the product iterates fast. Button names, supported models, and prices may already have changed. Anywhere a specific number or name matters, verify on the site first.
Corrections are welcome.
Licence
OpenDesign itself is Apache-2.0. This book is an independent community work, unaffiliated with and unendorsed by Powerformer, Inc.