I pointed my Claude skill at 3 famous repos, and it animated their READMEs

Description and use

The living‑canvas skill creates concise animated SVG banners from a repo’s README, illustrating problem, solution, and result with real metrics.

Problem

README banners often waste the brief moment to convey project value, relying on logos and gradients instead of clear messaging.

Outcome

For Ponytail, Ollama, and uv, the skill produced 8 KB SVG banners that clearly illustrated the problem, solution, and result, using real metrics and respecting reduced motion settings.

Workflow

• Clone living‑canvas skill into ~/.claude/skills
• Ask /living‑canvas with the target repo URL
• Receive an SVG banner
• Commit the SVG and add an <img> tag to the README header

Evidence

I built living‑canvas to do better: it's a Claude skill that reads a repo's README, finds the one idea at its heart, and turns it into a short animated story, left to right: the problem → what the project does → the result.

Source

Every banner follows the same rules: One self‑contained SVG, around 8 KB each for these three; No JavaScript, no external fonts or images; Every stage is labeled; Real numbers from the README; Respects reduced motion.

Source

Commit the SVG it gives you and add one line to the top of your README: <p align="center"><img src="assets/your-banner.svg" alt="Your project" width="100%"></p>

Source