Blog · Design
Design languages in DraftScreens: ten built-in looks, and your own
What a design language is in DraftScreens, the ten that are built in, from Minimal to Brutalist, and how a Studio plan swaps them for your own design system.
By DraftScreens · · 5 min read
Every project in DraftScreens has a design language. It is the reason a flow of six screens looks like one app. This post explains what a design language is, lists the ten that are built in, and shows how to use your own.
What a design language is
A design language is a small set of decisions that every screen has to follow:
- Palette roles. Not "blue", but which colour is the background, which is a surface, which is text and which is the one accent.
- Type. The fonts for headlines and body, and the scale between sizes.
- Radius. How round corners are, from zero to fully round.
- Spacing. How much air there is around and between things.
- Character. Shadows or flat, borders or none, gradients or solid fills.
In DraftScreens these are stored as tokens and repeated in the instructions for every screen and every edit. A screen cannot pick a new accent colour, because it is told which one to use.
The ten built-in languages
| Language | What it commits to |
|---|---|
| Minimal | Quiet neutrals, one ink, plenty of air. |
| Luxury | Serif headlines, gold on near-black, sharp corners. |
| Gen Z | Acid lime, hot pink, heavy type, thick outlines. |
| Clinical | Cool blues and calm hierarchy, built for trust. |
| Brutalist | Mono type, hard shadows, zero radius. |
| Glass | Frosted layers over deep violet gradients. |
| Neubrutalism | Chunky borders, offset shadows, candy fills. |
| Dark-first | True black surfaces with one hot accent. |
| Playful | Round type, soft shadows, warm coral. |
| Enterprise | Dense, neutral, systematic blue. |
Pick one from the menu next to the prompt box. If you leave it open, the planner chooses a direction that suits the brief.
Choosing one
Start from who the app is for, not from what you like.
- A banking or health app needs trust before personality: Clinical, Minimal or Enterprise.
- A consumer app for a young audience can afford to be loud: Gen Z, Playful or Neubrutalism.
- A premium product, such as travel or fashion, reads well in Luxury or Dark-first.
- A tool for people who like tools can carry Brutalist.
Because hand edits are free and a design is one credit, it is cheap to generate the same screen in two languages and compare.
Using your own design system
The built-in languages are a starting point. If you already have a brand, a Studio plan lets you save it as a design system with:
- a palette, with a role for each colour
- body and display fonts
- a voice, for the copy on the screens
- do and don't rules
- a logo
You can also pull a palette out of a screenshot of an existing app or site. If the brand lives in Figma today, see DraftScreens as a Figma alternative for mobile apps.
Link the design system to a project and it replaces the planner's choices. Every flow, screen and edit is generated from your tokens, so nothing has to be corrected back to the brand afterwards.
Why this matters
A language model asked for "a nice fitness app" draws the average of what it has seen: a familiar font, a purple gradient, rounded cards. A design language tells it exactly what to do instead, in terms it cannot ignore. Why every AI-generated app looks the same explains the problem in more depth, and how DraftScreens works shows where the tokens are applied.