obsidian-design-studio

Obsidian Design Studio

Obsidian Design Studio is the foundation of a living open technological commons for local-first visual design. It combines a readable, versioned .obsdesign document format with a purpose-built renderer and editor that currently runs as an Obsidian plugin and is intended to grow across web stacks.

The long-term mission is to make expensive closed design-tool workflows progressively less necessary—not through feature-count theater, but by letting real user needs become tested shared capabilities faster than a centralized product roadmap can absorb them.

The project uses supercollaboration: people contribute needs, context, taste, judgment, and accountability; agent harnesses such as Hermes, Claude Code, and Codex help inspect, design, implement, test, document, and prepare narrow contributions; the resulting capability returns to the commons through public review.

The first implementation registers .obsdesign as a versioned JSON document and opens it in a purpose-built Obsidian editor. Development remains use-case led: the current surface is a small working foundation, not a claim of Figma-equivalent capability.

Start here

1. Read the repository map.
2. Read the initiative.
3. Read the foundation plan.
4. Read the plugin MVP implementation plan.
5. Open the first Hypha design document after installing the plugin.
6. Review the open-commons and agent-contribution round table.
7. Read the public documentation map and version 1 format contract.
8. Open the public landing page and manuals.

Agent harnesses

Read skills/obsidian-design-studio/SKILL.md before working in this repository.

That file is the canonical Design Mode and gated Contribution Mode procedure. Hermes and Codex discover the pointer through AGENTS.md; Claude Code uses the tiny CLAUDE.md pointer; other harnesses can use the plain instruction above. Do not copy the skill body into adapter files or replace pointers with symlinks.

The clean-export rehearsal record is Gate 3 skill and harness rehearsal.

Current status

• Public source: ZenithResearch/obsidian-design-studio
• Public site: zenithresearch.github.io/obsidian-design-studio
• Default branch: protected main
• Product code: version 0.1.0 foundation implemented in src/
• Verification: local aggregate gate plus hosted GitHub verification and secret scanning
• Contribution boundary: Design Mode is operational; automated capability-gap issue/PR preparation remains closed until Gate 4 is implemented and reviewed

Commons, licensing, and ownership

The project uses maintained-commons governance with bounded Zenith Research custodianship during bootstrap. Contributions follow the contribution guide, Developer Certificate of Origin, security policy, and code of conduct.

Repository materials are currently licensed under AGPL-3.0-or-later; see LICENSE and the licensing explanation. Users retain the rights they hold in the .obsdesign documents, content, linked assets, and exports they create.

Copied and adapted public materials are inventoried in assets and provenance.

Publication safety and residual risks are recorded in the private-to-public release audit.

Develop

npm ci
npm run verify
npm run verify:format
npm run verify:public
npm run verify:skill

The production build emits main.js. Install main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css under <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/obsidian-design-studio/, enable the plugin, then open any .obsdesign file.

Visual QA demo

Open demo/index.html in a browser to review the editor frame without launching Obsidian. The fixture imports the shipping styles.css and exercises the same toolbar, nested layer tree, canvas and artboard treatment, selection state, and grouped inspector hierarchy used by the plugin.

The demo is a rendering fixture only. Editing behavior remains owned by ObsDesignView inside Obsidian.

The MVP supports:

• .obsdesign registration and file creation;
• versioned, validated, deterministic JSON;
• fail-closed handling of malformed, unknown-property, or future-version files;
• artboards, rectangles, and text;
• layer selection, dragging, resizing, deletion, zoom, and a property inspector;
• a responsive editor shell for desktop and compact Obsidian windows.

Deferred until a concrete use case needs them: images, vector paths, raster operations, masks, components, collaboration, and packaged assets.

Knowledge lifecycle

capture/ holds provisional inputs. Accepted product decisions move to notes/ or docs/. Implementation lives in src/, generated deliverables live in out/, and processed source material moves to archive/ without becoming current authority.