Hephaestus v0.3.0

Free desktop app · windows · macos · linux

Design help that
shows its work.

Hephaestus picks your colours, lays out your pages and tells you what's wrong with the result. Every answer comes from rules written in the app — you can read why it made each choice.

  • works offline
  • no account
  • no AI guessing
  • 6 mb
The Hephaestus bust rendered as pixel art: 56 blocks wide, seven warm tones, the edges dissolving into loose pixels.
◆ the forge 56 × 74 blocks quantised from the mark by rule · tools/pixel-art.py 0 models loaded

Four things, all of them yours

§ 01 — WHAT IT DOES

No cloud, no seats, no monthly bill. It's one program on your machine that does the parts of design that are tedious and repeatable.

01 · AKMON

Colours from a sentence

Type what you want — "calm banking app", "loud poster" — and it builds the whole palette: background, text, accents, borders, states. Contrast is checked while it works, not after.

02 · CANVAS

Layouts that stay tidy

Drop blocks on a canvas and everything keeps its alignment and spacing. Pages, links between pages, and an HTML export when you're done — previewable before you ship it.

03 · MERKHET

A review you can argue with

Point it at a design and it lists what's weak — contrast too low, spacing too tight, too many colours fighting — each with a specific fix it will make, or not, at your word. It never claims a repair it hasn't measured twice.

04 · TRENDS

Places to start

1,750 directions with colours, type and layout rules already paired, each one with a picture and a recipe. Browse them, search them, steal one, keep going.

What it looks like

§ 02 — SCREENS

The running app, shot at 1600 × 1000 — no mockups, no studio retouching. Both Claude skins are in here: the cream one and the dusted-black one. Scroll a picture out of view and it falls back apart into blocks; bring it back and it assembles again.

dashboardhome · claude / ambrosia
The dashboard in the cream Claude skin: stats band, saved builds, palette library, and a live grade for the current palette.
The bench. Everything you've saved, the state of the current palette, and a grade that updates as you work. The greeting changes with what you last did and what's still open.
akmoncolour
The colour screen: a forged palette with the page painted twice — once as assigned, once with the voice removed — plus a table of surface steps.
One line of intent in, a whole palette out. Below it, the same page painted twice so you can see what the colour is doing, and the surfaces measured in steps apart instead of vibes.
buildcanvas
The layout canvas with a heading block selected, showing drag handles, a block palette on the left and site-wide options on the right.
Blocks, not components. Drag, resize, stack, tab through what's underneath. The switches on the right are site-wide and the export obeys every one of them.
build▶ preview · 1440
The full-screen preview: the exported HTML shown at a chosen width with working links, beside the editor.
▶ preview shows the file, not a drawing of it. The exported HTML, full size, at 1440 / 1200 / 834 / 390, with its links live. What you see is what ships.
merkhetreview · fix
The merkhet panel listing findings on the page, with a verdict that reads 'checked twice: 1 of 1 fixed, nothing left'.
The reviewer, mid-repair. Four modes, each in plain language. Every change is measured before and after, anything that made it worse gets put back, and the verdict only says "fixed" when it verified it.
trends1,750 directions · paged 24
The trends library: a searchable, tag-filterable list of directions, each with a drawn example and a recipe.
1,750 ways to start, and every one buildable. Each entry carries the rules that define it, a picture drawn from them, and a recipe naming the exact preset, blocks and switches to press. Search, tag, sort, page.
akmonclaude / nyx
The colour screen in the Nyx skin: dusted black with orange coals, same layout, same readings.
Two Claudes. Click the theme tile and the cream one becomes dusted black with orange coals. Same voice, same rules, different room to work in.
cedalionask · answer
The Cedalion window open beside the colour screen, answering a question about the current palette.
"ask cedalion" asks. It reads the screen you're actually on and answers about it — the palette, the page, the canvas — in a window you can move and leave open.

What it isn't

§ 03 — THE CATCH

Worth saying out loud, because most tools avoid it.

Get it

§ 04 — DOWNLOAD

Pick your system. The three buttons below read the newest release on GitHub and fill themselves in, so this page is never out of date.

reading the latest release…

macOS builds aren't signed with a developer certificate yet, so on first launch right-click the app and choose Open. Everything else installs normally.

The code

§ 05 — OPEN, AND HOW TO BUILD IT

MIT, whole app and whole site, one folder. No CLA, no contributor agreement, no "core stays closed". If the buttons above are still pointing here, this page simply hasn't been connected to a repo yet — that's one command.

  • The engine is 4 files. colour, layout, review, trends — read them in an evening and you know every rule the app has.
  • Build it yourself, if the download isn't out yet. npm run tauri build and the installer is in src-tauri/target/release/bundle.
  • Nothing phones home. No update pinger, no crash reporter, no analytics. An updater that asks before it fetches, if you turn it on.
# the app, from a clone git clone https://github.com/OWNER/hephaestus cd hephaestus && npm install npm run dev # the web build, localhost npm run tauri dev # the desktop shell npm run tauri build # .msi · .dmg · AppImage
# this page, pointed at your releases node tools/connect.mjs <your-github-username> writes site/config.js, checks the repo is public, re-points every link, rebuilds the offline copy.