The only CI who returned to elementary school was in art class. I am, by all accounts, bad at design. Although I like to think I have a good aesthetic sense, I’m not good at bringing what I have in mind to life. Over the years, I’ve really tried to hone my design skills.
I’ve tried Photoshop, tried Figma, even followed 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 AI came into the picture and tools like NotebookLM (thanks to the Slide Deck feature) pretty much replaced the presentation side for me. But then Anthropic announced Claude Design, and well, the rest was history.
From chatbot to creative director
The last company I would have thought of launching a design tool is Anthropic, and yet here we are. Well, I probably should have expected that given the company’s track record of “killing” every other industry (at least according to the tech bros on X who announce the death of an industry every time Claude gets an update).
Anthropic announced Claude Design a few days ago, and unlike the interactive visuals, Claude Design is a standalone product that you’ll find in Claude’s sidebar (or by going directly to design.claude.ai). The feature currently available to all paid Claude subscribers is positioned as a full-fledged design tool capable of creating presentations, social media graphics, posters and more, all via natural language prompts.
I covered the launch (and all the drama surrounding it) in our dedicated AI Insider edition the week it launched, so I won’t rehash the details here (but you should take it as a sign to subscribe to the newsletter if you haven’t already).
Claude Design’s interface is divided into two main areas: a chat panel on the left where you simply describe what you want and chat with Claude as you go through the output, and a canvas on the right where you see the design in real time. The product is organized around four modes: Prototyes, Slide deck, From template and Other. Each one does exactly what you’d expect from the name.
I was tired of models that all look the same
Every design I made looked like everyone else’s
The only complaint I really had with Canva and Adobe Express was that pretty much everything you created would look the same. I would usually open one or the other tool with an idea I already had, and keeping in mind my terrible design skills, my next step would be to find the model closest to what I had in mind and tweak it from there. I spent a good few minutes tweaking colors and fonts and dragging things around to try to make it look… less pattern-like. As I mentioned above, my problem has never been that I don’t have ideas that would look good. It was about getting them out of my head and putting them on a canvas.
Since AI and design started merging, I knew this was a problem that would be solved fairly quickly. Claude Design was the first tool that actually solved the problem for me, and the result is actually something I would use. It also saved me a lot of the heavy lifting I would typically have to do if I was using a template on Canva or Adobe Express. For example, right after we release a new edition of our AI Insider newsletter, 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 the launch of Claude Design. I gave him the newsletter headlines, told him to generate an Instagram story for me, explicitly laid out my design requirements (basically what I had in mind), and told him to leave space for a link sticker so I could create a direct link to the newsletter page.
In just a few minutes, it generated something that was better than anything I had ever made in Canva using a template. Since it was generated following my exact instructions, it looked much closer to what I had imagined and I didn’t have to spend 20 minutes dragging things around to make it look the way I wanted. With a template, I would have had to replace every line of dummy text, play with font sizes, adjust spacing, resize elements, and inevitably accidentally delete the elements I wanted before I got it right. With Claude Design, I avoided all that chaos and ended up getting something I liked more anyway.
Iterating on designs has never been easier
No more dragging, dropping and praying
AI tools that can create engaging designs with a natural language prompt aren’t exactly new. But the reason why Claude Design won me over so quickly does not come down to the quality of the work. This is especially true since it is easy to refine them. You know how you give feedback to an editor by leaving comments throughout the draft and they go in and make the changes? Claude Design works in the same way.
There are different ways to iterate through your design. If you think there is a change that affects the overall direction of the design, you can use the discussion board and simply tell Claude what you want to change. For example, you can say something like “this looks too cluttered, simplify the layout” and Claude will rework it. Sometimes you have changes that only affect a specific element. Perhaps a title that’s too small, a color that doesn’t look right, or an element that needs to be replaced.
For these, you can click directly on the item in the canvas and leave an inline comment, just like you would in Google Docs. Claude picks it up and makes change without touching anything else. This saves you from having to describe in words the location of what you want to change and makes the experience much smoother when you want to make targeted changes.
And if you want to do a super quick change manually instead of asking Claude to do it, you can also press To modify and make small adjustments yourself!
I just wish the boundaries weren’t so tight
As with any good AI feature these days, the limitations are the buzzkill. Although Claude Design comes with a separate weekly limit (independent of Claude Web and Claude Code), reaching the limit doesn’t take too long. I’m on the Max 5x plan and I reached it much faster than expected. I can’t imagine what it’s like with the free plan!