The only C I ever got back in elementary school was in art class. I am, by every measure, terrible at design. Though I like to think that I have a good aesthetic sense, I'm not the greatest at actually 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 shot, dabbled in Figma, even sat through a few tutorials, but I always end up abandoning these tools and crawling back to simple drag-and-drop tools like Canva and Adobe Express. Then AI entered the picture, and tools like NotebookLM (thanks to the Slide Deck feature) pretty much replaced the pressentation side of things for me. But then Anthropic announced Claude Design, and well, the rest was history.

Claude Design is Anthropic's latest bet on creative tools

From chatbot to creative director

The last company I would've thought to release a design tool is Anthropic, and yet here we are. Well, I probably should've expected it 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 interactive visuals, Claude Design is a standalone product you'll find in the sidebar of Claude (or by heading to design.claude.ai directly). The feature which is currently available to all Claude paid subscribers is positioned as a full-fledged design tool that can create presentations, social media graphics, posters, and more, all through natural language prompts.

Claude Design's interface is broken down into two main areas: a chat panel on the left where you simply describe what you want and have back-and-forth with Claude as you iterate on 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 does exactly what you'd 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 practically everything you'd create would look the same. I'd usually open either tool with an idea I already had, and keeping in mind my terrible design skills, my next step would be finding the closest template to what I had in mind and tweaking it from there. I'd spend a good few minutes tweaking colors and fonts and dragging elements around trying to make it feel... less template-y. As I mentioned above though, my problem was never not having ideas that'd look good. It was getting them out of my head and onto a canvas.

Since AI and design started merging, I knew this was a problem that'd be addressed fairly soon. Claude Design is the first tool that's actually solved it for me, and the output has actually been something I'd use. It's also saved me from a lot of the heavy lifting I'd typically need to do if I were using a template on Canva or Adobe Express. For instance, right after a new edition of our AI Insider newsletter ships out, I like to share a post on my Instagram story about it. It's usually a fairly generic story, but I thought I'd mix things up with the launch of Claude Design. I gave it the headings of the newsletter, told it to generate an Instagram story for me, explicitly laid out my design requirements (basically what I had in mind) and told it to leave space for a link sticker so I could link directly to the newsletter page.

Within minutes, it generated something that looked better than anything I'd ever made in Canva using a template. Given that it was generated using my exact instructions, it looked a lot closer to what I had envisioned and I didn't have to spend 20 minutes dragging things around to make it look like what I wanted. With a template, I'd have needed to replace every line of dummy text, fiddle with font sizes, adjust the spacing, resize elements, and inevitably accidentally delete stuff I wanted before getting it right. With Claude Design, I skipped all of that chaos and ended up with something I liked more anyway.

Iterating on designs has never been this easy

No more dragging, dropping, and praying

AI tools that can whip up appealing designs with a prompt in natural language isn't really anything new. But the reason why Claude Design won me over so quickly doesn't come down to just how well-designed the outputs have been. It's more so how easy it is to refine them. You know how you give an editor feedback by leaving comments throughout the draft and they go in and make the changes? Claude Design works the same way.

There are a few different ways you can iterate on your design. If you think there's a change that affects the overall direction of the design, you can use the Chat panel and simply tell Claude what you want changed. For instance, you can say something like "this feels too cluttered, simplify the layout" and Claude will rework the whole thing. Sometimes, you have changes that only affect one specific element. Perhaps a heading that's too small, a color that feels off, or an element that needs swapping.

For those, you can click directly on the element in 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 hassle of describing the location of what you'd like to change in words, and just makes for a much smoother experience when you'd like to make targeted changes.

And if you want to make a super quick change manually instead of asking Claude to do it, you can also hit Edit and make small adjustments yourself!

I just wish the limits weren't so tight

As with every good AI feature nowadays, the limits are the buzzkill. While Claude Design comes with a separate weekly limit (independent from Claude web and Claude Code), hitting the limit doesn't take too long. I'm on the Max 5x plan, and I hit it way faster than I expected. I can't imagine what it's like on the free plan!