The only IQ they returned to in elementary school was art class. I am, in every way, terrible at design. Although I like to think I have a good aesthetic sense, I’m not the best at bringing what’s in my head to life. Over the years, I’ve really tried to hone my design skills.
I’ve given Photoshop a try, dabbled in Figma, even attended a few tutorials, but I always end up abandoning these tools and going back to simple drag and drop tools like Canva and Adobe Express. Then AI came onto the scene and tools like NotebookLM (thanks to Slide deck feature) pretty much replaced the presentation side of things 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 it given the company’s history of “killing” every other industry (at least according to the X techies who announce the death of an industry every time Claude gets an update).
Anthropic announced Claude Design a few days ago, and unlike interactive images, Claude Design is a standalone product that you’ll find in the Claude sidebar (or by heading to design.claude.ai directly). The feature that is currently available to everyone. Claude Paid Subscribers positions itself as a complete design tool that can create presentations, social media graphics, posters, and more, all through 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 repeat the details here (but you should take it as a sign to subscribe to the newsletter if you haven’t already done so).
Claude Design’s interface is divided into two main areas: a chat panel on the left where you simply describe what you want and have exchanges with Claude while iterating on the output, and a canvas on the right where you see the design in real time. The product is organized into four modes: Prototypes, Slideshow, From Template, and Others. Each one does exactly what you would expect from the name.
I was tired of templates 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 would create would look the same. I would usually open either tool with an idea I already had and, given my terrible design skills, my next step would be to find the template closest to what I had in mind and modify it from there. I spent a good few minutes modifying colors and fonts and dragging elements around trying to make it look…less templated. However, as I mentioned above, my problem was never not having ideas that looked good. It was getting them out of my head and putting them on a canvas.
Ever since AI and design started to merge, I knew this was a problem that would be fixed fairly soon. Claude Design is the first tool that really solved the problem for me and the result was something I would use. It also saved me from a lot of the heavy lifting I would normally have to do if I were using a template in Canva or Adobe Express. For example, right after a new edition of our AI Insider newsletter goes out, I like to share a post on my Instagram story about it. It’s usually a pretty generic story, but I thought I’d mix things up with the release of Claude Design. I gave him the newsletter titles, told him to generate an Instagram story for me, explicitly explained my design requirements (basically what I had in mind), and told him to leave room for a link tag so I could link directly to the newsletter page.
In a matter of minutes, he generated something that looked better than anything I had done 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 like what I wanted. With a template, you would have needed to replace every line of dummy text, change font sizes, adjust spacing, resize elements, and inevitably accidentally delete things you wanted before you got it right. With Claude Design, I skipped all that chaos and ended up with something I liked better anyway.
Iterating designs has never been easier
No more drag, drop and pray
AI tools that can generate engaging designs with a natural language message are nothing new. But the reason Claude Design won me over so quickly doesn’t come down to how well-designed the results have been. Even more so, how easy it is to refine them. You know how you give feedback to an editor by leaving comments throughout the draft and he goes in and makes changes? Claude Design works the same way.
There are a few different ways to iterate 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 Claude what you want to change. For example, you can say something like “this looks too cluttered, simplify the design” and Claude will rework everything. Sometimes you have changes that only affect a specific element. Maybe a title that’s too small, a color that doesn’t sound right, or an element that needs to be changed.
For them, you can click directly on the item on the canvas and leave an inline comment, just like you would in Google Docs. Claude picks it up and makes the change without touching anything else. This saves you the trouble of describing in words the location of what you want to change and provides a much smoother experience when you want to make specific changes.
And if you want to make a super quick change manually instead of asking Claude to do it, you can also press Edit And make small adjustments yourself!
I just wish the limits weren’t so strict.
As with all good AI features these days, the limits are rumors. While Claude Design comes with a separate weekly limit (separate from Claude web and Claude Code), reaching the limit doesn’t take long. I’m on the Max 5x plan and I reached it much faster than I expected. I can’t imagine what the free plan is like!
