The role of design patterns in forward engineering is well known, also if it’s not easy to use them, since large experience is needed. Different approaches and tools have been proposed in the literature to enhance and support the design process respect to design patterns exploitation. Also the role of design patterns in reverse engineering has been largely studied. In this paper, we describe a tool for design pattern recognition to be used in forward engineering as a kind of reuse advisor. As finding the right solution, or better finding the right pattern involves modeling some kind of similarity, we explore and propose some possible similarity-based techniques that could be used for design pattern recognition.