Claude Design

I reckon something like this has only been possible to develop because of how homogenous the internet has become in terms of design ever since the glass effect and drop-shadows took over in Web 2.0 and Twitter Bootstrap entered the scene.

You'll get a competent UI with little effort but nothing truly unique or mind-blowing.

Impressive technology, but that old skool artisanal weirdness of yore only becomes more valuable and nostalgic.

For my agency this won't replace Figma or designers. It's just a really useful tool to express yourself and communicate intent.

Before these tools, when a client wanted a specific section built, we'd spend hours hunting references across the web. The output always ended up feeling like a mesh of 2-3 sites, never fully unique. Then we'd burn more time explaining the intent to the client's designers and devs, usually with multiple rounds because words don't convey layout well.

Now we throw a quick mockup together in Claude or Lovable and send it. The designer gets the idea in 30 seconds instead of a 45-minute call, then pushes it further with their own taste and the client's branding.

It's not replacing designers. Most clients don't know what they want until they see it. These tools collapse that feedback loop from weeks to minutes, so the designer actually spends their time on the parts that need human taste, not on decoding a vague brief.

If you look at Figmas stock price, it started falling right at 11 AM as this news was released.

Anyways, this is 100% a shot at Figma, but also catching Lovable in the crossfire. If anybody from Anthropic is reading this, if you keep developing this with features in Figma and other design tools, you'll have a major hit on your hands.

I threw my sales deck at it and asked it to implement our brand guidelines (attaching that as a PDF). It did a great job and then began giving me internal server errors... I'm going to assume this part of their model farm is totally overwhelmed.

Interesting! I wrote this approach up (more or less - extract design system -> make templates -> export) some time ago and I've found it unbelievably powerful: https://martinalderson.com/posts/how-to-make-great-looking-c....

I use it all day every day with Claude Code. I sometimes wonder past code if this has had the biggest impact on my day to day productivity, either having to make do with semi-bad looking reports or have a designer design them (which is slow).

Sort of feel sorry for Figma in a way though, given all the "partnerships" (highlighting their MCPs) and case studies they've done with Anthropic and then they release this. I note there isn't a testimonial from them this time.

I'm surprised how poorly Figma have used "AI" in general - given they were the "gold standard" in taking emerging technologies (WASM etc) and making an incredible product. The Figma Make thing was incredibly underwhelming, I managed to extract the system prompt out and it's basically just Gemini 3 Pro with a design prompt. Perhaps the original team has left?

They are extremely exposed imo. While all the UI/UX designers will continue using it for the forseeable, I strongly suspect a lot of their (A/M)RR was coming from extra seats for PMs, developers, etc to view and export and do commenting on the files - not core designer usage. I think a lot of this just won't happen on Figma as much.

It really feels like Anthropic's product area is extremely overextended at this point. If they want to extend themselves horizontally in an unlimited fashion, they will need unlimited focus, and agents can't supply that. Things will fall through the cracks. Why should I believe that Anthropic will care about this product in 2, 3 years? Whereas I firmly believe that Figma will care greatly about its product in that time

I thought polymet did a pretty good job of creating mobile app designs and component libraries when I tested it. Winder how this will compare

"create polished visual work like designs, prototypes, slides, one-pagers, and more."

I use Opus to generate Typst for that and I'm already pretty happy with that approach. It gives me a degree of control I do not have with other methods, because

1. Typst is really powerful

2. Opus is really good at surgically modifying Typst

I basically never look at the Typst code for this. Telling Opus visually what I want changed is usually good enough.

The more I think about it the more this isn't good for design [EDIT], for a few reasons:

- The best design is original, groundbreaking and often counterintuitive. An AI model is incapable of that, it's uninspired, it will absolutely converge to the norm and homogeneity (you see it everywhere now, just scroll on ShowHN and take a look at the UIs) and produce the safest design that appeals to its understanding of the ideal user.

- Good designers will reject this, they prefer to be hands-on and draw from multiple sources of inspiration which is what Figma boards and Canva is good for, also mainly for cross-collaboration. If you've seen how quickly a great design engineer can prototype you'll know that "speed" they advertise in this video is not worth the tradeoff.

- Creatives typically have a very very very high aversion to AI.

- Non-designers will not see a purpose for this tool, basic design can already be done through Claude Code and Claude.ai, I fail to see what this could offer unless they leverage a model that is more creative and unique by default (you can not prompt/context/harness engineer creativity believe me I've tried).

- Design is a lot more than just UI. Tools like this ignore so many other important aspects like: motion, typography, images, weight, whitespace, sound, feel.

This is cool!

Seems like Claude is actually building almost like a layered Figma wireframe that you can do fine grained adjustments afterwards (e.g. adjust font size).

Interesting that Canva provided a quote of support. I'm not familiar with the differentiation, but it seems like this will directly siphon customers from Canva, right?

So how much of this is fully generated vs AI running through all the knobs on template widgets?

Is that globe made from whole cloth or is there a bespoke "telecom globe" widget that it dropped in? Could I ask for mock up of molecules with the same fidelity of knobs, down to nucleus size and such?

ultimately if it’s so close to the finished product you may as well just do it in cursor rather than have an extra step.

The design problem to solve post-ai isn’t this it’s how the space for thinking fits into all this, getting to the end result slower so human ideation can play out. This is just optimized for the first generic output + tweaks.

Had some fun with the wireframe mode, very useful to sketch some interaction concepts

It's interesting how OpenAI and Anthropic effectively mass dumped a bunch of similar features in the last two days.

I wonder what other features they're cooking right now.

Google ai studio has been doing this pretty well for mockups for me at least. I do see people running out of their already limited tokens using this though, unless they silo them to another collection of tokens.

Edit: I see they have a new token tier 'Claude Design' so that's good.

404 Page not found when clicking on their link https://claude.ai/design at the end of the article! Vibe coding to prod, gone wrong?

The Anthropic team looks to be eating all the usecases and application layer. I personally know of many figma + AI startups that are going to feel shaken up with this launch.

Anthropic has distribution on their side, their engineers are excellent (I have ran with them across the ggb in the past and they work 12 hours plus a day regularly.)

I think what actually might be slowing them down is the public releases and pr lol, not ideas or execution

Unless you want something that looks like it's designed by Anthropic, this is still pretty shit. Amazingly "AI" hasn't replaced the very first target on their radar - design.

When Anthropic's CPO left Figma's board this week, that was my first question . Oof.

Lovable was a TailwindCSS recombinator, that’s it.

Lately it is more and more ShadCN as well.

TailwindCSS is a masterpiece but ironically doesn’t really get its fare share while “Build on top of TW” frameworks make money.

TailwindCSS is the final evolution after all other frameworks always had its benefits but also massive limitations.

BEM anyone?

TW is really elegant a new paradigm in its purest sense and brilliantly executed. No wholes could be poked in it for years and the extensibility shows, how brilliant it is.

Bootstrap will always be held dearly but it was about browser quirks etc first. Important milestone but stands no chance against TW.

They state the link is claude.ai/design, which currently goes to:

Page not found Claude can help with many things, but finding this page isn’t one of them.

when logged in.

I just started using Claude and its amazing. I cant believe ive waited so long. Looking forward to designing

> voice, video, shaders, 3D and built-in AI.

As someone who's thinking about side project-ing a game, this caught my eye.

I am curious to explore what Claude can yolo in terms of a retro style indie game... One who's audience might only be me.

Really interesting response to Google's Stitch - and seemingly a better alternative given some of the features shown in the video. If everything actually works at least close to how it's advertised, this'll be useful. I'm sure it's no Dieter Rams, but it wouldn't be a surprise if it's already better than many devs at design work.

Unfortunate that linking code from your computer doesn't work with Firefox

Very interesting though

Maybe I am using it wrong but it feels much closer to Lovable than Figma. I was expecting this to feel like the two products combined. Certainly better than Lovable though, but a little disappointing.

One thing I am wondering: How much logic (in the programming sense) is there in this product and how much of it is „just“ a lean wrapper around the LLM?

I've been spending the last two days building a large number of mockups for a new product. Literally the last two days.

I'm wondering how i can CONTINUE that in this design thing, can i import something? Because they show it the other way... you can start and edit, and then export to claude code.

Until then, I guess it's back to just using CC

So.. this is why Anthropic CPO left the board of Figma

Just started messing around with this but I like it. It produces better results than just using Claude Code on its own. The initial output has a lot of junk that needs to be removed (just like anything LLMs generate). I suspect it's only good at reproducing content that is relatively cookie-cutter and prominent in the training data. But still, as a non-designer this produces better results than I can and in line with the level of quality of many paid templates.

I've been using stich from Gemini, and just plain zAi for helping redesign my website. You can use the generated code to copy and paste the design to fit your own templates, but that's a pain. Unless you are ok with using tailwind and the dozen or so classes on every element and don't want to edit anything.

What I found valuable is the design.md that was produced. It's a guide for building each component. So using these tools becomes akin to PSD to html we used do. At least that's when I find them most effective.

Anthropic’s roadmap is widely underappreciated; it is the company defining AI productivity today.

What’s interesting here is that with AI, all our interfaces should evolve away from previous generation rigid forms / buttons / tables etc. towards something more fluid / dynamic / “natural”. Yet all the AI coding is geared towards producing more of the former.

Reminder that Claude's own AI design skill (which is probably incorporated directly into this product) says things like

>NEVER use generic AI-generated aesthetics like overused font families (Inter, Roboto, Arial, system fonts), cliched color schemes (particularly purple gradients on white backgrounds), predictable layouts and component patterns, and cookie-cutter design that lacks context-specific character.

> Interpret creatively and make unexpected choices that feel genuinely designed for the context. No design should be the same. Vary between light and dark themes, different fonts, different aesthetics. NEVER converge on common choices (Space Grotesk, for example) across generations.

[1] https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/blob/main/plugins/...

We used to have RAD based IDE's and now I guess with AI we're going full circle, I'm curious how their mobile thing works, if its just React Native based or what.

I like their emphasis on quickly prototyping many variations of a design. That seems useful, even for experienced designers.

Will give it a try but my experience with Claude and browser use so far is that it’s extremely lazy: it rarely notices or cares when something doesn’t look right, it needs lots of pointing out “hey you ignored that broken render” etc

Will be taking this for a spin imminently. What seems to be very unique here vs other canvas tools are the generative UI controls.

If you’re confused about why everyone is shipping their own canvas tool - this is what I wrote when I reviewed Stitch from Google in my newsletter:

“every SOTA (State-of-the-Art) model can already do this. Give it a prompt, it'll spit out an HTML design. Ask for 10 responsive variations, you'll get them. Stitch is a Ul and context harness on top of Gemini, in the same way Claude Code is a harness on top of Claude's models. This means every Al lab will likely ship their own version, and they'll all interoperate because at the end of the day it's all HTML and markdown.”

More generally, this is a competition of where the product development work starts and lives. The business value will accrue to those who become a destination, not a plugin.

AI can now power a new sort of tool that supports the entire process (not just coding or just design). So there’s no reason for Anthropic or any other lab to give that up to another tool.

Design industry is shaking right now.

Who’s the end user for this? I struggle to relate but then again I also don’t use Figma so I may not be the target demographic

I have been doing fine just instructing Claude code to use Tailwind and reference design documents

such a cheerful background music to celebrate the death of lovable, bolt.new, figma LOL

It's funny seeing the Co-founder of Canva commending the product. Yikes!

This app is pretty slick, this will funnel a huge number of customers away from Figma + Canva imo.

Start designing at claude.ai/design.

That link is redirecting me to https://claude.ai/404, anyone else?

this might be a game changer (for show dont tell), and fast itterations in design meetings, to show what your thinking of.

I think we will have maybe 5 to 10 years of all this crap, devaluing human made art and human made products, vibe coding everything. But eventually it will all fall apart. Long term only a minority will be happy seeing AI generated crap everywhere and most people will pay for quality human made goods.

Unfortunately it's going to be a tough few years until that happens, where it really does feel like the idiots are winning.

THE IDIOTS ARE WINNING

The faster we commodify design the faster we can get back to some sane consistent normal interfaces. Only the very biggest platforms (e.g. Google, Microsoft, Apple) should be spending any time on "design systems".

Imagine if a designer were hired to custom design the lightswitches in every building. We need to get back to off-the-shelf interfaces and stop wasting smart people's time reinventing UI widgets.

no info regarding privacy and data if you connect your repo?

How dangerous is this eh?

This stuff is the antithesis of what I want to see AI used for.

Deriving a bland average of creativity is the saddest thing you could do. I don’t even enjoy design and I find this offensive.