Ok so I had two problems today with design view. 1) None of my tags where rendering in design view - This was a dependent library problem. I had added the web center libraries manually to my project and had somehow removed the personalization library this lead to a ClassNotFound error in my message log simple to fix once you know where to look. 2) Second problem vexed me for a while my c:set jstl tag libraries where just NOT rendering correctley in design view. This turned out to be a checkbox Execute Tags in JSP Visual Editor was unchecked. [Project Properties > JSP Tag Libraries]