Designers Favourite MCP

Your AI's hands inside Adobe — with a professional's judgment.

Designers Favourite MCP (dfm) is an MCP server that lets an AI assistant such as Claude or ChatGPT actually operate professional Adobe apps for you — Illustrator, Photoshop, After Effects, and Premiere Pro — through smart, workflow‑shaped tools.

It is not a thin "click this button" wrapper. Every job runs through built‑in quality control, saves a restore point before it changes anything, and pauses for your approval before client‑facing work ships.

Created and owned by Gokul Dhatkshina Moorthy. Proprietary — see LICENSE. A Free tier is available for solo Illustrator work, and a paid Studio subscription ($4.99/month, 7‑day free trial) unlocks everything.

Download the source: Designers-Favourite-MCP (main.zip)

New here? The quickest way to understand what this is: read Quick start below, or visit the friendly website (it lives in its own repo).

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Table of contents

• What it is (in plain English)
• What makes it different
• The 12 workflows
• Requirements
• Quick start
• Connect it to Claude Desktop
• Use it with ChatGPT (HTTP mode)
• Your first job, step by step
• Free vs Studio
• How it works (architecture)
• Security & privacy
• For developers
• Project structure
• FAQ & troubleshooting
• License

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What it is (in plain English)

MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open standard that lets an AI assistant use outside tools safely. Designers Favourite MCP is one of those tools. Once it's connected, you can talk to your AI in normal words —

"Make 20 business cards from this spreadsheet using my template."

— and it will open Illustrator, do the careful work, check its own output, show you a preview of exactly what changed, and wait for you to click Approve.

You never write code. You never touch a script. You talk; it works; you approve.

What makes it different

	Feature	In one line
🧩	Works inside your AI	Runs right inside Claude Desktop or ChatGPT — just ask in plain English.
🛠️	12 professional workflows	Whole jobs across four Adobe apps, not single button‑presses.
✅	Quality control that fails closed	A tireless proofreader: catches overflowing text, tiny fonts, low contrast, off‑brand colours, print‑bleed problems, audio that's too loud/quiet, and gaps in a timeline. If a check fails, the work stops.
↩️	A restore point under every change	A perfect checkpoint is saved before anything is altered, so you can always go back. Like an undo button that never fails.
👀	Human approval before it ships	You see a preview, a summary of exactly what changed, and the quality report — then choose Approve / Adjust / Reject.
🔒	Private and local	Your files stay on your machine. Access is protected by a secret token. Every action is written to an audit log.

The 12 workflows

Grouped by app. Free tools work on the free tier; Studio tools need a Studio licence.

Adobe Illustrator — the free core

Tool	What it does	Tier
generate_from_template	Turn a spreadsheet into dozens of on‑brand designs at once (e.g. 20 business cards from a CSV).	Free
export_artboards	Export every artboard to all the sizes and file formats you need in one go.	Free
restyle_by_selector	Change colours, fonts and styles across many objects using a simple rule.	Free

Adobe Photoshop

Tool	What it does	Tier
batch_process	Run a whole folder of images through a pipeline; one broken file fails on its own and the rest still finish.	Studio
smart_export	Export to many sizes and formats with tidy, predictable names.	Free
apply_look	Apply a consistent colour look/grade across images.	Studio

Adobe After Effects

Tool	What it does	Tier
render_queue	Queue and render compositions in the background without freezing your work.	Studio
apply_mogrt_data	Fill motion‑graphics templates (MOGRTs) from a spreadsheet.	Studio
replace_and_version	Swap footage or assets and save a clean new version of the project.	Studio

Adobe Premiere Pro

Tool	What it does	Tier
assemble_rough_cut	Build a first cut automatically from your clip bins.	Studio
conform_audio	Normalise loudness to broadcast targets (−14 LUFS) so nothing is too loud or too quiet.	Studio
export_deliverables	Export the whole set of delivery formats a client needs at once.	Studio

LUFS is the broadcast standard for loudness. −14 LUFS keeps audio comfortable — nothing too loud, nothing too quiet.

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Requirements

• macOS (the Adobe bridges use osascript; Windows support is planned).
• Node.js 20+ and pnpm 10+.
• At least one Adobe app for the workflows you want to use (Illustrator is enough to start).
• An AI client — Claude Desktop is the easiest.

🚀 Quick start

Today the server runs from source (a one‑command npm install is on the roadmap — see Distribution). Do not run npx dfm — that name belongs to an unrelated third‑party package, not this tool.

# 1. Get the code
git clone https://github.com/Gokul2/Designers-Favourite-MCP.git
cd Designers-Favourite-MCP

# 2. Install and build
pnpm install
pnpm -r build

# 3. Set up your local config (creates ~/.dfm with a config file,
#    a freshly generated secret token, and a local database)
node packages/core/dist/cli.js init

# 4. (optional) make the `dfm` command available everywhere
cd packages/core && npm link && cd ../..
dfm stats     # prints quality stats once you've run some jobs

init is idempotent — running it again keeps your existing token and config.

Connect it to Claude Desktop

Open Claude Desktop's config file (Settings → Developer → Edit Config, or ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json) and add the server. Use the absolute path to the built CLI:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "designers-favourite-mcp": {
      "command": "node",
      "args": [
        "/absolute/path/to/Designers-Favourite-MCP/packages/core/dist/cli.js",
        "--stdio"
      ]
    }
  }
}

Restart Claude Desktop. You'll see Designers Favourite MCP appear in the tools menu. That's it — now just talk to Claude.

Use it with ChatGPT (HTTP mode)

The same server can run over HTTP for ChatGPT (via a tunnel such as cloudflared). A bearer token is mandatory and the server binds to 127.0.0.1 only:

node packages/core/dist/cli.js --http --token "$(openssl rand -hex 32)"

Point your tunnel at the printed local address and give ChatGPT the same token.

Your first job, step by step

1. Open the Adobe app you want to use (for example, Illustrator with a template document).
2. Ask your AI in plain English:

   "Using my-template.ai, make a card for each row in people.csv and save them to ~/Desktop/cards."

3. Watch it work. The tool saves a restore point, generates each card, and runs quality control.
4. Review & approve. You'll get a preview, a list of exactly what changed, and a quality report (e.g. "No text overflowing its box ✓, Minimum font size met ✓"). Click Approve and you're done — or Reject and nothing is committed.

A note for Premiere Pro: Premiere connects through a small panel you load inside the app (see packages/panel-premiere). The panel connects out to the local server; you never expose Premiere to the network.

Free vs Studio

	Free	Studio
Price	$0	$4.99/month (7‑day free trial)
Who	One person, solo work	Teams & studios
Apps	Illustrator only	All four Adobe apps
Workflows	The 3 core Illustrator tools	All 12 workflows
Seats	1	Multiple
Shared QC rulesets your studio owns	—	✓
Audit trail export	—	✓
Pro delivery formats (OTIO)	—	✓
Priority render queue	—	✓
Runs entirely on your Mac	✓	✓

Studio features are unlocked by an offline‑verifiable licence key — no phone‑home. Every studio feature is gated through a single entitlements module.

How it works (architecture)

Designers Favourite MCP is a TypeScript monorepo. The moat is quality architecture + cross‑app breadth + studio‑owned rules, not a per‑action wrapper.

• Bridges (packages/bridges) — one adapter per Adobe app. Illustrator/Photoshop/After Effects talk over osascript; Premiere talks to a UXP panel over a local WebSocket. Every host‑derived string is taint‑typed so it can never be interpolated into a script, and every script is auto‑wrapped and time‑limited.
• Scene IR (packages/ir) — a compact, typed model of a document/timeline. Assets are handles (asset://…); raw bytes never enter it. Tools return diffs, not whole snapshots, to stay token‑efficient.
• Composites (packages/composites) — the 12 workflow tools. Each = four files (schema, host script, QC rules, tests). Every mutation checkpoints first and QC runs fail‑closed.
• Tasks (packages/core) — long jobs (renders, big batches) run as protocol‑native MCP Tasks with crash recovery.
• Code mode (packages/codemode) — a sandboxed (isolated-vm) surface where the model can chain tools in TypeScript and save reusable "skills".
• QC engine (packages/qc) — YAML rulesets + built‑in checkers (text overflow, min font size, contrast, brand ΔE, bleed, loudness/LUFS, timeline gaps).
• Checkpoints (packages/checkpoints) — content‑addressed, hard‑linked restore points under ~/.dfm/checkpoints.
• Approval UI (packages/apps-ui) — a self‑contained preview + diff + QC panel with Approve/Adjust/Reject, degrading to a plain form when the client lacks MCP Apps.

For the full design brief and milestones, see docs/architecture-v4.md.

Security & privacy

• Local‑first. Your files never leave your machine. There is no cloud service.
• Token‑gated. HTTP mode requires a bearer token (no default), binds to 127.0.0.1, and compares tokens in constant time.
• Auditable. Every tool call is logged (timestamp, tool, a hash of the arguments, outcome, checkpoint id) — raw arguments are never stored.
• Reversible. A checkpoint is saved before every mutation.
• Sandboxed. The code‑execution surface runs in an isolated-vm with no filesystem, network, or process access.

For developers

pnpm install          # install workspace deps
pnpm -r build         # compile all 9 packages (strict TypeScript)
pnpm -r test          # run the unit/integration suite (~1,079 tests)
pnpm lint             # eslint (type-checked)

Live tests exercise the real Adobe apps and are skipped by default. Open the app you want to test, then:

LIVE=1 pnpm --filter @dfm/composites test

Distribution

The shipped program is tiny (~3 MB of compiled JS). node_modules in this repo is developer tooling only and is never distributed. Planned: publish to npm under a unique package name (e.g. designers-favourite-mcp) so end users can run a one‑command install like npx designers-favourite-mcp init and add it to Claude Desktop with a one‑line config, or ship a single bundled binary. (The bare name dfm is already taken on npm by an unrelated project, so it can't be used.) See the README section above for the current from‑source path.

Project structure

Designers-Favourite-MCP/
├── packages/
│   ├── core/            # MCP server, both transports, Tasks, entitlements, CLI (dfm)
│   ├── ir/              # Scene IR (canvas / timeline / graph) + diff + OTIO export
│   ├── bridges/         # Illustrator · Photoshop · After Effects · Premiere adapters
│   ├── composites/      # the 12 workflow tools (four files each)
│   ├── codemode/        # isolated-vm code-execution surface + skills
│   ├── qc/              # quality-control engine + checkers (incl. pure-TS BS.1770 loudness)
│   ├── checkpoints/     # content-addressed restore points
│   ├── apps-ui/         # approval UI (MCP Apps HTML + elicitation fallback)
│   └── panel-premiere/  # UXP panel + local WebSocket proxy for Premiere
├── docs/                # architecture brief and guides
└── skills/              # saved reusable code-mode recipes

The marketing and user‑guide website lives in its own repository: Designers-Favourite-MCP-Website (static, self‑contained, deployable on Vercel).

FAQ & troubleshooting

Do I need to write code? No. You talk to your AI in plain English; the tool does the Adobe work.

Where do my files go? Nowhere. Everything runs locally on your Mac.

What if it makes a mistake? A restore point is saved before every change, and nothing client‑facing ships without your approval. Reject, and nothing is committed.

"Server not showing in Claude Desktop" — check the path in your config is absolute and points at packages/core/dist/cli.js, that you ran pnpm -r build, and restart Claude Desktop.

"HOST_BUSY" from After Effects — that's expected while AE is rendering; the server queues or rejects work rather than freezing the app.

Windows? Not yet — the Adobe bridges currently use macOS osascript. A Windows COM bridge is on the roadmap.

License

Proprietary — all rights reserved. Copyright © 2026 Gokul Dhatkshina Moorthy. This is paid software, not open source: no permission is granted to use, copy, modify, or distribute it except under a paid licence from the owner. A Free tier and a paid Studio subscription ($4.99/month, 7‑day free trial) are offered. See LICENSE for the full terms, or contact gokul2info@gmail.com.

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_{Built as a professional creative‑pipeline orchestrator. Free for solo Illustrator work; Studio for teams who live in Adobe.}