You find a website with great design. Everything feels cohesive. The buttons, the inputs, the spacing, the typography—it all perfectly aligns into a beautiful design system.

If you want to replicate that aesthetic in your own project, the traditional advice is to right-click, select "Inspect", and start manually copying CSS properties from Chrome DevTools.

But DevTools was built for debugging, not for reverse-engineering design systems. Digging through nested divs and overridden CSS classes is exhausting. Fortunately, in 2026, there are completely automated ways to copy a website's design system without ever opening the inspector.

Extract Directly from the Web

No browser extension required. Just paste any URL into our web app and instantly extract design tokens, assets, and full source code.

Launch Web App →

What Makes Up a Design System?

Before extracting a system, you have to know what you're looking for. A design system on the web is primarily composed of:

  1. Design Tokens: The atomic values (colours, typography scales, spacing units, border radii).
  2. Components: The reusable UI elements (buttons, cards, navbars, modals).
  3. Layout Primitives: The grid systems and flexbox patterns governing the structure.

When you try to copy a design system using DevTools, you have to manually extract all three of these layers for every single element.

The Old Way: DevTools Excavation

Let's say you want to copy a beautifully designed Button component.

In DevTools, you click the button. You see it has a class like btn-primary. You look at the Styles panel. You see padding: var(--spacing-sm) var(--spacing-md). Now you have to search the CSS to find what those variables equal. Then you see the button uses a shadow: box-shadow: var(--shadow-elevation-2). You hunt down that variable. Then you realize there's a hover state, an active state, and a disabled state.

Replicating just one button can take 10 minutes of detective work.

The Automated Way: Using Extractor Tools

The modern workflow for copying a design system bypasses DevTools entirely. By using a DOM-analysis tool like ZipIt, you can automate the extraction of both tokens and components.

Step 1: Extracting the Base Tokens

Instead of hunting down CSS variables, you let the extractor do it for you. ZipIt scans the entire page and compiles a list of the foundational design tokens.

/* What ZipIt instantly exports for you */
:root {
  --radius-sm: 4px;
  --radius-md: 8px;
  --radius-lg: 16px;
  --radius-premium: 24px;
  --color-brand: #E8521A;
  --font-display: 'Inter', sans-serif;
}