CO2 capture is essential for reducing the carbon footprint of coal-fired power plants. Here we show, both experimentally and computationally, a new design strategy for capturing CO2 in nanoporous adsorbents. The approach involves 'complementary organic motifs' (COMs), which have a precise alignment of charge densities that is complementary to the CO2 quadrupole. Two promising COMs were post-synthetically incorporated into a robust metal-organic framework (MOF) material using solvent-assisted ligand incorporation (SALI). We demonstrate that these COM-functionalized MOFs exhibit high capacity and selectivity for CO2 relative to other reported motifs.