awwwards-mcp

awwwards-mcp

Free, open-source MCP server that gives AI agents design inspiration from Awwwards — the Mobbin-style visual reference loop, sourced from the web's best award-winning websites.

Your agent searches in natural language ("dark 3D portfolio sites", "soft pastel e-commerce"), sees real screenshots inline, and can pull the design DNA of any site: color palette, tech stack, design elements, award history. Beyond inspiration it's a full evidence loop: band-map any page, census its scroll and hover motion, fingerprint its framework, capture canvas/pose grids, then verify your build against the reference (band + motion scoring) and generate GSAP timeline stubs from the captured motion.

And it's not just Awwwards websites — every capture, census, and verification tool runs on any URL. Just give it any site link and tell it to recreate: band-map it, study its motion, rebuild section by section, and score your build against the original.

Free-text queries run on a porter-stemmed, prefix-matching FTS5 index with BM25 ranking — "magazines" now finds Magazine-tagged sites (68 on the live index), best matches first, where the old substring path returned zero. Multi-word queries keep AND semantics: every token must hit the same site.

Tools

Tool	What it does
search_sites	Search by color, tags, technology, award type or free-text query. Multi-word queries match against the local FTS5 index and rank BM25 (title hits lead); zero results come with loose-match and taxonomy-tag hints. Default full results include each site's screenshot; use responseMode: "compact" for concise cards and inline previews of only the first two results on the requested page.
get_site_details	Full design DNA for one site: palette, technologies, elements, awards, description.
compare_sites	Compare 2–3 sites' design DNA and jury scores as text-only JSON. Uses cached details or fetches missing detail pages.
create_design_brief	Turn 2–5 selected site slugs plus a required project goal into a deterministic, cited build brief. Uses cached detail/element evidence and cached Motion DNA first, fetches only missing details, returns Markdown plus versioned JSON, and runs browser band analysis only with includeStructure: true.
get_index_status	Read local index count, crawl progress, last success/error, lock state and freshness without network requests.
get_site_elements	Component-level visuals for one site: each element's poster image inline (3D models, video content, mobile layouts, microcopy…) + video URLs.
list_categories	Every filter the agent can search by (200+ tags, 27 colors).
capture_live_site	Optional: fresh full-page screenshot of any live URL. Waits for load + a settle window with a bounded pre-scroll, so heavy sites work (waitStrategy: "networkidle" available). Pass viewport: "mobile" for the 390×844 iPhone-class render ("desktop" 1440×900 default). (needs playwright).
analyze_page_structure	Section band map of any page (live URL or local file:// build): tag, background, offset, height per band. Compare a reference site's structure against your build. Same heavy-site-friendly wait (waitStrategy: "networkidle" available); viewport: "mobile" analyzes the phone-class layout ("desktop" default). (needs playwright).
record_site_motion	Optional: short motion-through video of a live URL — preloader, scroll-triggered and hover/cursor animations. Returns an inline filmstrip JPEG plus the saved .webm path. viewport: "mobile" records at phone size — the filmstrip renders at the selected viewport, no pillarboxing ("desktop" default). Every recording also produces a Motion Evidence Sheet (sheet.html + motion-sheet.md): census-directed keyframes, consecutive-frame diff masks, an onion-skin composite, a cursor-trail overlay and a phase timeline — motion video turned into a document a model can actually read. Degrades gracefully: recording never fails because the sheet does. (needs playwright + ffmpeg-static).
search_elements	Search the inspiration-elements gallery (footer, hero, pricing, 404…) by free text; ranks BM25 over title/author/category.
get_element	One element record: title, category, author, built-with stack, related elements and its media URL (image or video) pointing at awwwards' CDN.
get_motion_dna	Runtime motion fingerprint of a live URL: animation libraries, render engines, ScrollTrigger stats (trigger count, scrub ratio), tween easing/duration vocab and the scroll model. Fresh capture or cached capture with timestamp.
analyze_scroll_map	Per-element scroll-motion census of any URL: selector path, trigger source (gsap-scrolltrigger / native css scroll & view timelines / data-attr / css-keyframe / SMIL), animated props, duration, easing, scrub/pin flags and SVG stroke draw-ins — the rebuild recipe an agent can wire straight into GSAP timelines. Optional scrubProbe re-drives the page through ≤8 scroll steps and samples each scrubbed trigger's real progress curve (scrubCurves); every payload ends with a choreography block — hints[] (selector/value/source) and groups read from gsapTriggers tween vars and stepped sibling delayMs. (needs playwright).
analyze_hover_census	Hover-interaction census: extracts :hover rules from stylesheets, then samples up to 20 interactive elements before/after hover — transform/color/filter diffs plus transition timing (ms + easing). The hover recipe for rebuilds, no video required. (needs playwright).
analyze_bundle	Bundle forensics for a live page: fetches the page once, downloads its script chunks (script tags, inline scripts, and modulepreload/preload-as-script hints; bounded: ≤40 chunks / 10MB / 1 request/second), saves + hashes them locally, optionally de-obfuscates with webcrack if installed, and greps keywords across the code — chunk paths + match lines so an agent can read the actual animation mechanism instead of guessing. Needs no browser.
verify_build	Score a build against a reference site: band-map compare (Dice score) + motion-fingerprint diff (trigger mix, scrub/pin, easing vocabulary, native scroll timelines) → 0–100 score, pass/warn/fail verdict and evidence lines. The design-loop gate: build → verify that band's score → fix → re-verify. (needs playwright).
capture_component	Optional: serialize one page component (CSS selector, default header) into a portable component-pack-v1 JSON pack — bounded DOM tree with computed-style tokens (44 keys incl. layout offsets + ::before/::after pseudo styles, maxNodes up to 2000), fonts, colors and element animations — for pixel-informed rebuilds. Runs on any URL. (needs playwright).
capture_pose_3d	Hero canvas reference frames → camera pose grid; runs on any URL. Samples the page's largest canvas at up to 10 scroll steps with per-step scroll ratios, a pose-grid-v1 grid ready for 3D replay (viewport: "mobile" supported). (needs playwright).
build_pose_stub	Pose grid → offline three.js+GSAP replay skeleton. Renders a pose-grid-v1 grid as a standalone scroll-scrubbed stub page: frames preloaded inline, camera path interpolated between snapshot scroll ratios, reduced-motion static fallback; optional analyze_scroll_map census adds st/pin/ease suggestions. Pure build — no page fetches.
analyze_stack	Fingerprint any page's stack from one polite HTML fetch (no browser): framework (Next.js/Astro/Nuxt/Remix/SvelteKit/WordPress/Webflow/Framer), CSS framework (Tailwind/Bootstrap) with marker lists and honest confidence, plus a stack-fingerprint-v1 payload.
build_gsap_stub	Captured motion evidence → runnable single-file GSAP+ScrollTrigger stub: one timeline per scroll-census anim (trigger, start: "top 80%", scrub/pin, census duration, cubic-bezier easing normalized to the nearest GSAP token), plus an optional scroll-driven camera module from pose-grid anchors (synthesized dolly-in over the page's three.js canvas). Always-on prefers-reduced-motion guard; lenient — empty inputs still build a valid page. Pure build from provided JSON — no page fetches.
search_motion	Search previously captured motion-DNA scans by library, scroll model or easing vocabulary — find references by how a site moves.
new_winners	Poll today's freshly-crowned winners (SOTD / Developer Award / Honorable Mention) against a persisted baseline. First call seeds and dumps the listing; later calls report the delta. Each first-seen winner's Elements section is backfilled into the searchable element corpus, so new winners are element-searchable immediately.
watch_site	Persistent watches over studios, tags or specific sites (add/list/remove). list matches each watch against the freshest cached listing and reports per-watch NEW since last check deltas — it never fetches; new_winners/search_sites keep the pool fresh.

create_design_brief turns 2–5 shortlisted references into a cited direction:

• Search and shortlist references with search_sites.
• Call create_design_brief with the slugs and a required project goal.
• Use its Markdown direction and versioned JSON; set includeStructure: true only when optional browser-derived section-band evidence is needed.

The response separates observed shared signals from one-site outliers, names evidence gaps, and never records motion automatically. Its Interaction Plan applies only evidence-backed cursor/hover, scroll, entrance/reveal, easing, and duration cues; empty fields mean the brief has no supporting evidence, not that an effect should be invented. It also carries a prefers-reduced-motion, content-access, and keyboard-access guardrail.

Data posture: element records store metadata + media URLs pointing at awwwards' own CDN — nothing is mirrored. Motion DNA records are local captures, each stamped with the time it was taken.

Setup

Stable, current, fully offline — no API key, no account. Any MCP-compatible coding agent can use awwwards-mcp. Requires Node ≥ 22.13 (node -v to check). Pick your agent:

Updates: the server checks the npm registry once a day and prints an stderr notice when a newer awwwards-mcp exists (stdout stays clean for the JSON-RPC channel — your agent sees the notice as a log line). Set AWWWARDS_AUTO_UPDATE=1 in the server's env to opt into background self-update; restart your agent afterwards to load it. Nothing is fetched more than once a day and serving never waits on the check.

Claude Code

claude mcp add awwwards -- npx -y awwwards-mcp

Codex CLI (ChatGPT desktop app and the IDE extension share this config)

codex mcp add awwwards -- npx -y awwwards-mcp

or in ~/.codex/config.toml (project-scoped: .codex/config.toml):

[mcp_servers.awwwards]
command = "npx"
args = ["-y", "awwwards-mcp"]

OpenCode (opencode.json — note the command is an array)

{
  "$schema": "https://opencode.ai/config.json",
  "mcp": {
    "awwwards": {
      "type": "local",
      "command": ["npx", "-y", "awwwards-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

ZCode (~/.zcode/cli/config.json — note servers nest under "mcp": { "servers": ... })

{
  "mcp": {
    "servers": {
      "awwwards": { "command": "npx", "args": ["-y", "awwwards-mcp"], "env": {} }
    }
  }
}

Claude Desktop / Cursor / Windsurf / Gemini CLI / Cline / Continue — anything reading the common mcpServers JSON shape (e.g. ~/.claude/claude_desktop_config.json or ~/.gemini/settings.json):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "awwwards": { "command": "npx", "args": ["-y", "awwwards-mcp"] }
  }
}

Anything else — awwwards-mcp is a plain stdio MCP server: point your client at npx -y awwwards-mcp and it works. To pin a version, use npx -y awwwards-mcp@1.9.0.

pi coding agent has no built-in MCP by design — it uses skills and extensions instead. Two options:

• Install the awwwards-inspiration skill (below). pi reads skills from ~/.pi/agent/skills/ or ~/.agents/skills/ (the latter is shared across agents following the Agent Skills standard). The skill teaches the workflow; for it to reach the live data, add an MCP-supporting pi extension, or run the queries in another agent and paste results.
• Skip MCP entirely: ask pi to build you a small CLI wrapper around awwwards.com, or use a shared skills directory (~/.agents/skills/) so the same skill file serves pi and every other agent.

Optional browser captures (needed by capture_live_site, analyze_page_structure, record_site_motion, the scroll/hover censuses, verify_build, capture_component and capture_pose_3d):

npm install -g playwright && npx playwright install chromium

record_site_motion additionally uses ffmpeg; it resolves the ffmpeg-static package automatically if present.

Skills

This package ships five agent skills. Any agent that follows the Agent Skills standard can load them; copy them into your agent's skills directory:

npm install awwwards-mcp
mkdir -p ~/.agents/skills && cp -r node_modules/awwwards-mcp/skills/awwwards-inspiration node_modules/awwwards-mcp/skills/awwwards-setup node_modules/awwwards-mcp/skills/awwwards-doctor node_modules/awwwards-mcp/skills/awwwards-motion-study node_modules/awwwards-mcp/skills/awwwards-section-loop ~/.agents/skills/

Skill	What it teaches
awwwards-setup	First-time onboarding: asks the user's preferences (result density, viewport, captures, local index, winner watches), persists them to ~/.awwwards-mcp/preferences.json, and runs any one-time installs they opt into.
awwwards-inspiration	The inspiration loop: search, judge from screenshots, pull design DNA, state a design direction, capture/motion-first builds; staying current with new_winners and watch_site.
awwwards-motion-study	The full video chain: what to record from a live site (and what to skip), frame-by-frame review (video input or tile-per-element), the motion inventory, and build verification by re-recording. Now opens with an instrument-first pass: scroll/hover censuses, motion DNA, and pose capture before (and instead of) recording.
awwwards-doctor	Repair: run npm run doctor, apply its fixes, re-anchor parsers after real awwwards.com drift, recover the in-flight task that surfaced the failure.
awwwards-section-loop	Section-by-section rebuilding: band map → per-section capture → build → verify that band's score → lock → next; selector fallback rules, shared-canvas one-unit rule, and the lock-before-next discipline.

Agent	Skills directory
Claude Code	~/.claude/skills/
pi	~/.pi/agent/skills/ (also reads ~/.agents/skills/)
ZCode	~/.zcode/skills/
Agent Skills-standard agents	~/.agents/skills/

Windows: run this from Git Bash, or copy node_modules\awwwards-mcp\skills\awwwards-setup manually.

Indexing (recommended)

search_sites works out of the box, but its depth is limited by polite live scraping (~31 sites per filter page). Build a local index once and searches draw from thousands of award-winning sites instantly:

npx -y -p awwwards-mcp awwwards-index      # once published
# or, from a local checkout of this repo:
npm run index

• Crawls all ~200 tag pages at 1 request/second (~4 minutes) into the local SQLite cache at ~/.awwwards-mcp/.
• Resumable: interrupt it and re-run — completed pages are skipped.
• The MCP server re-indexes automatically in the background whenever the index is older than 7 days (never blocking your session). Completed crawl checkpoints are cleared so each refresh actually revisits the tag pages. Run get_index_status to inspect progress or the last crawl error.

Elements index (optional)

The search_elements tool auto-indexes the first gallery page (~48 items) on first use. To build a full corpus (~1,500+ items, ~15 pages at 48/page):

npm run index -- --elements all     # follow pagination until exhausted
npm run index -- --elements 10      # first 10 listing pages

Any crawl beyond the first page also runs the taxonomy pass: every facet page (/elements/footer/, /elements/cta/, … 46 categories) is fetched once and each element under it is stamped with that category, so search_elements' category filter works across the corpus. Element pages carry no breadcrumb, so this listing-side pass is the only category source; elements seen on no facet page stay unsorted.

Element rows are searched by title, author, category and slug tokens (slug is an FTS5-indexed column; a cache opened from an older schema version rebuilds its search index automatically on first open). Each element also carries the slug of the award-winning site it came from (siteSlug/siteUrl in search_elements/get_element results). Two record sources share this corpus: gallery records (indexed from the public elements listing) and source:"site" records backfilled from each new SOTD winner's own Elements section by new_winners — their slugs are namespaced site-<siteslug>-<title> so the two never collide. The elements index has the same 7-day freshness gate as the sites index — a re-run inside the window skips itself.

Site details (palettes, tech stacks) are still fetched on demand and cached for 7 days. Awwwards page and CDN requests have a 10-second deadline per attempt, including response-body reading; transient page failures are retried once, while blocks (403/429) and CDN failures are not retried.

How it works

• Live, polite scraping of awwwards.com public pages (max 1 request/second, robots.txt-compliant paths only, cached 7 days in SQLite at ~/.awwwards-mcp/).
• Screenshots are served from Awwwards' own CDN (880×660), cached on disk.
• No API key, no account, no cost.

Ethics & terms

This tool fetches publicly available pages for personal design-inspiration use, at human-ish request rates, honoring robots.txt. Awwwards' screenshots and content remain the property of Awwwards and the credited creators — don't bulk-scrape, redistribute, or republish them. If you use this commercially, review awwwards.com's terms yourself.

Built with awwwards-mcp: five real sites

Four complete sites were built through the full inspiration loop this MCP enables, using nothing but the server's tools plus the shipped awwwards-inspiration skill. Each one exercised a different corner of the loop — and every correction the loop caught on the way became doctrine in the skill.

Built in one shot, by a model that can't watch video. All three sites were built in a single prompt run on GLM 5.3-flash — which does not support video input. The loop's motion study worked entirely from frame-tiled filmstrips (ffmpeg, 1–2 fps per element) instead of watching the recordings. With a video-native model, those same get_site_elements videos and record_site_motion .webm files could be watched directly — timing, easing and overlap read at full fidelity — and the motion-true results would be better still. The skill's frame-tile doctrine is what closes that gap today.

Watch the whole loop run (1:50):

Screen recording of the agent running the awwwards-inspiration loop end to end with the awwwards MCP tools — searching SOTD references with inline screenshots, pulling design DNA, frame-studying element videos, building, and verifying with band maps + motion recording. If your client doesn't render the player, watch the file directly.

1. Ridge (source) — a Swiss-minimal single-page showcase for a fictional engineering-talent studio, direction Aspen Search (SOTD + Developer Award, jury 7.48): monochrome #FAFAF8/#1A1A1A + mint, giant grotesque section markers, halftone grain, asymmetric panel grid, dark discipline panels in an interior horizontal pin passage, count-up stats, client rows, theme toggle, cursor-follower. Built with the v1.4.0 toolkit: FTS5-ranked direction search, both-viewports reference captures and QA (desktop 7,849px + mobile 390×844), overflow audit (0px both), pin-center shots, film verification — and the skill-memory flywheel recorded the findings. QA evidence: showcase/ridge/_qa/.

The grain-panel hover, studied from aspensearch.com's recording and rebuilt as a canvas dither-dissolve — dots flip to mint around the mouse, the trail elongates, the boundary dissolves:

Panel grid (desktop)	Horizontal discipline passage	Mobile 390×844

2. Fallow Press (source) — a flat-2D editorial journal, direction Emergence Magazine (SOTD): pink #FF9398 on cream and black, torn-paper masthead (pure CSS clip-path, zero WebGL), giant grotesque display over grayscale photography, serif-italic brand, three pages with separate horizontal projects/about pages (GSAP ScrollTrigger pin + containerAnimation).

Torn-paper masthead (home)	Horizontal gallery (Fields)	Horizontal chapters (Practices)

The loop as it ran:

• search_sites (magazine filters) → shortlist judged from inline screenshots → get_site_details on Emergence Magazine.
• Capture before building: capture_live_site + record_site_motion on the live site first; full-page PNG and motion .webm kept in fallow-press/ref-motion/ as the evidence trail.
• Build, then verify: full-page capture plus panel-center pin shots of both horizontal pages (13 stops each, in fallow-press/_qa/ — capture-qa.mjs is reusable).
• The pin shots caught a real bug: horizontal-panel entrances used toggleActions: "play none none reverse", and 100vw panels hide content at midpoints on the way back — copy disappeared mid-view. Fix (one-shot play entrances) is now doctrine: full-viewport panels get one-shot entrances; QA pin shots land at panel centers, not uniform fractions, or you photograph empty transition zones.

3. Cerebrium recreation (C:/Users/Afjal/cerebrium-recreation/) — a fidelity-first recreation of cerebrium.ai, pixel-checked against the live reference: full-page captures of both sides, analyze_page_structure band compare, and SVG icon/legend fixes until the build matched the reference to within 1px of total page height (10,871px vs 10,870px). This is the structure-before-pixels doctrine at its strictest — band maps compared, never just totals.

4. The Meridian (C:/Users/Afjal/editorial-site/) — an editorial journal built from ORDR/Hearst references: the first build to run the whole loop end-to-end. analyze_page_structure caught a masthead band bug by comparing the build's band map against the reference's; the reference captures, motion film, and the reusable pre-scroll capture script live in editorial-site/_qa/.

5. NEUTOMNI one-shot rehost (A:/nio/) — a 1:1 capture-and-rehost of neutomni.com built in a single MCP pass: the live page was captured with the toolset and re-served locally with the site's own DOM, stylesheet, and scripts (relaunched as a standalone static copy — no CMS, no build step). This is the migration-recovery posture: for sites you own or are authorized to rehost when the original vendor vanishes. Faithful because nothing was re-derived — geometry, motion, and copy come along exactly.

The full build lives in the repo: showcase/neutomni/ — open index.html directly, no server or build step needed.

Skills used to build these

Skill	Role in the builds
awwwards-inspiration	The 8-step loop itself (ships with this package): search → judge from screenshots → design DNA → capture/motion study → state direction → build → band-map verify.
gsap-scrolltrigger	The horizontal pin + containerAnimation pattern (ease "none", one-shot entrances) driving both Fallow Press horizontal pages.
gsap-core / gsap-timeline	Tween composition and sequenced hero entrances (torn-paper drop, panel copy rises).
frontend-design	Typography, palette and layout judgment applied when translating reference DNA into original pages.
lenis (library, via skill guidance)	smooth scrolling synced to ScrollTrigger on the Fallow Press home page.
tailwindcss / plain CSS	All builds are plain hand-rolled CSS — flat 2D, no frameworks needed.

The skills self-improve: every loop pass records what verification caught (scripts/skill-memory.mjs record), and a deterministic distiller folds rules seen 2+ times into your installed skill copy — while the shipped copies only change via human PR. A techniques registry (skills/_memory/techniques.json) catalogs researched how-tos per domain (video understanding, motion detection, UI structure, micro-interactions, images).

Reduced-motion, JS-less visits, and capture tools all get graceful fallbacks (vertical stacks; progressive-enhancement reveals).

What the verification loop caught — proof the structure-before-pixels doctrine is load-bearing:

• Element posters lie: the first showcase build was designed from poster frames alone and rendered a spinning 3D ring as floating static cards. Downloading the element videos (get_site_elements) and frame-tiling them revealed the motion truth — now the skill mandates studying motion before animating.
• Full-page captures of reveal-on-scroll builds showed blank sections: .reveal animation state vs capture's no-scroll reality. Builds ship content-visible-without-JS progressive enhancement.
• Horizontal-panel copy vanished mid-view on the Fallow Press pages: toggleActions reverse reverts entrances while a 100vw panel is still holding the viewport (see above).
• Band-map compare kept the references' rhythm instead of drifting on section heights (Cerebrium, The Meridian).

Prompt counts: 3 for the original showcase build (the build ask, the motion correction that exposed the poster-lie, the structure pass) and 1 for Fallow Press ("create a new website using our MCP and skills… no 3D websites") — its two follow-ups were caught by the QA loop, not by the user. Each correction became doctrine in the shipped awwwards-inspiration skill: frame-study element videos before animating; judge page architecture from the studied passages; tile per element, not one giant filmstrip; capture live sites and animation before building.

Can awwwards-mcp crawl the sitemap? (robots.txt notes)

The awwwards.com robots.txt advertises Sitemap: https://www.awwwards.com/sitemap.xml and — verified live 2026-09-18 — that sitemap URL returns a soft-404 HTML page (as do common child names like /sitemap-websites.xml). So sitemap discovery isn't currently a path to more data; the polite crawl surface is exactly what the indexer uses:

• Allowed and used: /websites/, /websites/<filter>/, /sites/<slug> (one filter per URL; deep pagination stays un-crawled).
• Disallowed and never fetched: /tag/, /search-websites, /websites/? (query-string pagination), /elements/*, /vote/, favourites/likes/follows, and the rest of the 33 rules.
• Our client (src/awwwards.ts buildFilterUrl) constructs only /websites/… paths at 1 request/second — the loop stays inside the published rules by construction, not by convention.

Contributing

PRs welcome! The project especially needs parser-drift fixes — when live awwwards.com markup changes, a fresh HTML snapshot attached to an issue often becomes the new test fixture and the fastest merged PR. See CONTRIBUTING.md for the full guide:

Parser-drift is monitored automatically. A probe script (scripts/parser-drift-probe.mjs, npm run drift) checks every markup anchor the parsers depend on — the split/indexOf/regex literals in src/parsers.ts — against the live listing and detail pages (2 fetches, 1 request/second, same politeness as the client). A daily GitHub Action (.github/workflows/parser-drift.yml) runs it and, on drift, opens/updates a single tracking issue with the exact anchors that changed (and auto-closes it when a later run is green). To run it yourself: npm run drift (live, exit code 0/1/2) or npm run drift -- --fixture (offline, checks the committed fixtures still feed every anchor). Raw HTML is never diffed or stored — anchors only fire when the parsers actually break, so there are no false alarms from cosmetic tweaks.

• Development setup & project layout (offline fixture-tested, no network in tests)
• How to create a PR: fork → fix//feat//docs/ branch → typecheck + tests → PR template
• The politeness constraints new code must keep (1 req/s, robots.txt paths, light runtime deps)

Bugs and feature ideas start as issues with templates. Security problems go privately — see SECURITY.md. By participating you agree to the Code of Conduct.

Development

npm install
npm test        # offline unit tests against committed HTML fixtures
npm run smoke   # manual live smoke test against awwwards.com
npm run build   # compile to dist/

MIT — see LICENSE.