Chrome extension · Free forever

Trace any interface.
Down to the hover state.

Lay OnionSkin over a live page and it reads what the browser is really doing — the type sizes, the spacing, the focus rings, what changes when you hover or resize. Then you hand that sheet to your AI and it can build from the real thing, not a guess.

Alt + Shift + S traces the page you're on · No sign-up

The gap

A screenshot is one frame
of a whole system.

Hand your AI a picture and it has to guess the rest — from one resting state, at one width, with none of the names. It will guess confidently. And it will be wrong in the places nobody bothers to screenshot.

A screenshot holds
  • Roughly what colour things are
  • Roughly how big the text is
  • Where things sit at one width
  • What the button does on hover
  • Where the focus ring goes
  • What changes on a smaller screen
  • What the team named any of it
  • Which shadow sits on which layer

Three out of eight, and the easy three.

A tracing holds
  • Every value read from the live page, not guessed from a picture
  • Hover, focus, active and disabled — the states a screenshot misses
  • What changes when the screen gets narrower, and which bits move
  • The names the designers actually used for their colours and sizes
  • What sits in front of what, in order
  • How long things take to animate, and how they ease

The states are the point. That's where the real work lives.

Six layers

It reads the page,
not the source.

Source code tells you what someone typed. OnionSkin looks at what the browser actually drew — colours settled, sizes decided, names kept. That's how it catches the stuff that only shows up on hover, or when you squeeze the window.

Palette

  • The main colour, taken from what people actually click
  • Background, text, muted and border — kept separate
  • Success, danger and warning, when they show up
  • The greys, lined up light to dark

Type

  • Which fonts the page uses, including the ones it loads in
  • The real size ladder, not the one in the docs
  • Weight, line height and letter spacing at each step
  • Headings measured one by one

Spacing & shape

  • Padding, margin and gaps, wherever they turn up
  • The base spacing unit the page seems to run on
  • Corner radii, with pills called out as pills
  • Shadows and gradients copied as they are, not rounded off

Parts

  • Buttons by style, plus cards, fields and badges
  • How the header and nav are put together
  • A ready-to-paste style block for each part
  • The bits the page spent the most care on

States

  • Hover, focus, active and disabled
  • Read from the stylesheet — a screenshot never sees these
  • What changes when the screen gets smaller
  • How long animations take, and how they ease

Where it came from

  • What it was built with — Tailwind, shadcn, Radix, MUI and the rest
  • Colour and size names kept as the authors wrote them
  • What sits in front of what, plus the page skeleton
  • A confidence score on every value, so you know what to trust

Handoff

Two ways to
hand it over.

Pick based on how big the job is. One screen? Drop the whole sheet into the chat. Longer build? Give your AI something it can ask questions of as it goes.

Push

Straight into the chat

One click opens the conversation with the sheet, a screenshot, and a prompt already ready. Add a line about what you're building, or send it as-is and let the AI read first. It also lands on your clipboard, so if the chat tool changes overnight you're one paste away — not stuck waiting on a broken button.

  • Claude
  • ChatGPT
  • Gemini
  • Lovable
  • Manus
  • Cursor
Ask

As a little helper, for longer builds

Export the sheet as a tiny helper your AI can talk to. Instead of re-reading the whole document every turn, it just asks for the one value it needs — a colour, a radius, how a button behaves on hover.

One small file. No install step. Works with tools that speak MCP — Claude, Cursor, and friends.

Folio

A drawer of other
people's decisions.

Every sheet you keep stays searchable — by site, by tag, by that colour you half-remember. Reference you pick up while browsing, not something you sat down to organise.

  • raycast.com
    primary
    #FF6363
    radius
    10px
    face
    Inter
  • arc.net
    primary
    #1B1B1D
    radius
    16px
    face
    Inter
  • posthog.com
    primary
    #F54E00
    radius
    6px
    face
    MatterVF
  • resend.com
    primary
    #000000
    radius
    8px
    face
    Inter
  • framer.com
    primary
    #0099FF
    radius
    12px
    face
    Inter
  • ghost.org
    primary
    #15171A
    radius
    pill
    face
    Inter

Hold two sheets to the light

Put any two sheets side by side and the differences show up on their own — main colour, corners, font, spacing. Tiny colour shifts nobody would notice don't get shouted about like the ones everybody can see.

Trace over your own code

Point it at your Tailwind config or your CSS file and the comparison runs the other way: how far your build has drifted from the design it was meant to match, which of your variables to move, and a patch written in your own names.

Exports

A sheet leaves in
whatever shape you need.

A tracing isn't much use stuck inside an extension. Take it to Figma, drop it into a config, or hand it to your AI as something it can ask questions of.

  • Markdown The sheet your AI reads
  • JSON Everything, neat and structured
  • CSS variables Drop straight into your styles
  • Tailwind Ready to merge into your theme
  • shadcn Colours in the shape it expects
  • Figma tokens In the format Figma likes
  • Canva palette For the moodboard
  • AI helper One small file your AI can ask
app-height-com.md excerpt
## Type ramp

display   Söhne 600 · 48/52 · -0.02em
heading   Söhne 600 · 24/32 · -0.01em
body      Inter 400 · 15/24 · normal
mono      Berkeley Mono 400 · 13/20

## States — button/primary

rest            bg #0f62fe
hover           bg #0353e9
focus-visible   ring 2px #0f62fe, offset 2
active          bg #002d9c
disabled        bg #c1c7cd · cursor not-allowed

confidence: 0.94 — 41 samples

Three jobs

Reach for it when the
design is already decided.

You have to match something

There's a design already, and your build has to sit next to it without looking off. Stop poking around in the inspector on eleven elements to check if that corner is 8 or 10. Trace it once and work from the numbers.

You're working from a reference

You found a site that solves the problem well and you want its bones, not a pixel-perfect copy. A sheet gives your AI real structure to build on — so the first try is worth editing, not throwing away.

You need to check your own

Point it at your own product and the sheet becomes a mirror. Here's what actually shipped, next to the config that was supposed to make it — and every place the two stopped agreeing.

Privacy

It only looks at the page
you point it at.

The permission list is short on purpose. There is no server quietly collecting what you browse — because there isn't a server, bar the one exception below, which felt worth saying out loud.

  • Nothing runs until you click

    OnionSkin only opens the one tab you ask it to. It has no ongoing access to anything else you browse.

  • Your config is read, not collected

    Files you hand over to check against your own code are read in the page and thrown away. They never get uploaded. A config file is just treated as text — that's all it needs to be.

  • Four permissions. That's the whole list.

    It can see the active tab, run a script, and store sheets on your machine. No account to create. No sync to turn off.

  • One thing does leave

    If you buy the folio, a licence check talks to a server — that's the exception, and it only carries a licence key, not your sheets. Everything you trace stays where you traced it.

Pricing

Tracing is free.
£3.99 keeps the folio.

Pay once, keep it. No subscription, no account, nobody counting seats.

The extension

£0always

  • Trace any page, as often as you like
  • All six layers, every value
  • Hover, focus and other interaction states
  • Send to Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Lovable, Manus, Cursor
  • Markdown and JSON out
  • Keyboard shortcut
Add to Chrome
Paid once

The folio

£3.99one payment

  • Everything free does
  • Sheets kept for good — searchable and tagged
  • Compare two sheets side by side
  • Trace over your own Tailwind, CSS or shadcn config
  • All eight export shapes
  • AI helper export
  • Patterns across everything you have kept
Open the folio

Every paid feature runs three times free first. Try it before you buy it.

Stop describing the design.
Hand it over.

Free to trace, as often as you like. No sign-up. What you trace stays on your machine — only the sheet you choose to send, and a licence check if you buy the folio, ever leave it.