Back in elementary school, the only CI was in art class. I am terrible at design by any measure. While I like to think I have good aesthetic sense, I’m not the best at putting things in my head into action. I’ve really tried to improve my design skills over the years.
I’ve given Photoshop a shot, dabbled with Figma, even gone through a few tutorials, but I always end up abandoning those tools and going back to simple drag and drop tools like Canva and Adobe Express. Then artificial intelligence entered the picture and tools like NotebookLM (thanks Slide Deck feature) has pretty much replaced the presentation side of things for me. But then Anthropic announced Claude Design and the rest is history.
From chatbot to creative director
The last company I would consider releasing a design tool was Anthropic, and here we are. Yeah, I probably should have waited given the company’s track record of “killing” all other industries (at least according to the tech bros who announce the death of an industry every time Claude gets an update on X).
Anthropic announced Claude Design a few days ago, and unlike the interactive visuals, Claude Design is a standalone product that you can find in Claude’s sidebar (or by navigating to this page). design.claude.ai directly). A feature that is currently available to everyone Claude paid subscribers Presentations, social media graphics, posters, etc. positioned as a full-fledged design tool that can create
I covered the launch (and all the drama surrounding it) in our special edition of AI Insider the week it was released, so I won’t rehash the details here (but you should take that as a hint. subscribe to the newsletter if you haven’t).
Claude Design’s interface is divided into two main areas: a chat panel on the left where you simply describe what you want and talk back and forth with Claude as you repeat the output, and a canvas where you see the design in real time on the right. The product is organized around four modes: Prototypes, Slide Deck, From Template and Other. Each one does exactly what you’d expect from the name.
I was tired of templates that all looked the same
Every design I made was similar to everyone else’s
My only complaint about Canva and Adobe Express was that almost everything you create will look the same. I usually opened both tools with an idea I already had, and given my terrible design skills, my next step would be to find the closest template to what I had in mind and modify it from there. I’d spend a few minutes tweaking colors and fonts and dragging elements around trying to make it feel… less template-y. As I mentioned above, my problem was never having ideas that would look good. He took them out of my head and put them on the canvas.
As AI and design began to merge, I knew this was a problem that would soon be solved. Claude Design is the first tool that really settled for me and the result has been something I will actually use. It also saved me a lot of heavy lifting that I would normally have to do if I was using a template in Canva or Adobe Express. For example, right after a new edition of our AI Insider newsletter comes out, I like to share a post about it on my Instagram story. This is usually a pretty generic story, but I thought I’d mix things up with a Claude Design presentation. I gave him the newsletter headers, told him to create an Instagram story for me, clearly stated my design requirements (basically what I meant), and told him to leave room for a link sticker so I could link directly to the newsletter page.
Within minutes, he created something in Canva that looked better than anything I’d ever done using a template. Given that it was created using my exact instructions, it looked much closer to what I intended and I didn’t have to spend 20 minutes dragging things around to get it to look the way I wanted. With the template, I had to replace every line of dummy text, fiddle with font sizes, adjust spacing, resize elements, and inevitably delete by accident before I got it right. With Claude Design I skipped all that chaos and ended up with something I like better anyway.
It has never been easier to replicate designs
No more dragging, dropping and praying
Artificial intelligence tools that can produce attractive designs with a natural language instruction are nothing new. But the reason Claude Design won me over so quickly wasn’t because of how well-designed the outlets were. How easy it is to upgrade them. You know how you give feedback to the editor by commenting throughout the draft and they go in and make changes? Claude Design works the same way.
There are several different ways you can replicate your design. If you think there is a change that affects the overall direction of the design, you can use the Chat panel and simply tell Clo what you want to change. For example, you can say something like “this looks too confusing, simplify the layout” and Claude will redo everything. Sometimes you have changes that only affect one specific element. Maybe a title that’s too small, a visible color, or an element that needs to be changed.
For these, you can click on an item directly on the canvas and write an inline comment, just like in a Google Doc. Claude picks it up and makes the change without touching anything else. This saves you the trouble of describing in words what you want to change and provides a more convenient experience when you want to make targeted changes.
If you want to make a super fast change manually instead of asking Claude to do it, you can also hit. Edit and make small adjustments yourself!
If only the restrictions weren’t so tight
As with every good AI feature today, the limitations are noise. Although Claude Design comes with a separate weekly limit (independent of Claude web and Claude Code), it doesn’t take long to hit the limit. I’m on the Max 5x plan and hit it faster than I expected. I can’t imagine what it’s like on the free plan!
