What To Build First With Claude Design

0:00Today on the AI Daily Brief, the top use cases for the new Claude design. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.

0:34While you are at AIDailyBrief.ai, a quick thing to point you to, I've been thinking a lot recently about a major challenge that I see where all these companies know they need people to have these new AI skills, but don't exactly know how to qualify or vet those skills. And on the other side, individuals who are developing those skills don't necessarily have a great way to show it. Feels like an interesting opportunity to me to create a type of standard for credentials that allows that gap to fill in faster. And so I'm surveying to get a little bit more info. If you're an individual who is interested in getting certified around your AI skills, and even more importantly, frankly, at least for the purposes of what we do next, if you are someone who is hiring for a certain set of skills or whose job it is to validate those skills among your existing employees, I would so appreciate it if you would just take a minute to fill that out.

1:23It's the top banner on the homepage right now. It's actually the only banner on the homepage right now. And again, thanks in advance for taking the 30 seconds to do that. Now, in terms of today's episode, we are once again doing a full main, no headlines episode. We do have a bunch of headline stories to catch up on, but Anthropic had to go and drop this very valuable and powerful new Claude Design suite on Friday. Come hell or high water tomorrow, we will be back with a normal format episode or perhaps even an extended headlines to catch up on all the news. But for now, let's talk about the top use cases and the early reactions to Claude Design.

1:55Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief. we are officially at the point where there is so much being released that a major feature, the type of thing that, as we will see, has the power to literally move markets, was released on a Friday in the middle of the day, not even first thing in the morning. I'm talking, of course, about Claude Design, which comes just a day after we got Claude Opus 4.7. Now, design is pretty much what you would imagine a design tool from Claude to be. And it's important to note that a lot of this is not some entirely net new functionality, It's a new wrapper around design with some pretty significant UI upgrades for the design experience.

2:33In sharing design, Anthropic points to a few different use cases. First of all, one of the big value propositions they discuss is the ability to explore concepts more broadly before committing to a direction. They call it rationing exploration and point out that basically no one has the time to actually prototype a variety of different directions for exploration, so you pretty much have to commit to a design system from the beginning before you actually dive all the way in. Agendic design dispenses with that constraint, and the interaction that it proposes is that you prompt it to build a first version or versions, as you'll see as we walk through the process, you can get specific with Claude design about how wide a variety of options you want it to explore, and then from there you refine it.

3:13Now what's interesting about the user experience here is that pretty much every way you could think of to refine the design is available in this interface. You can use natural language inputs to describe what you want to change. You can use inline comments. You can direct edit on the canvas. And there's a feature that a lot of people are really excited about that are these custom sliders that allow you to drag from one end of the spectrum to another for a particular design element, such as a font, a color, a shading, etc. Early testers Anthropic said, we're using claw design for things like realistic prototypes, product wireframes and mockups, design explorations, pitch decks and presentations, marketing collateral, and frontier design.

3:48Basically future-oriented things that don't necessarily have a reason for being quite yet, but which could prompt the next generation of building. So two key subtexts in that set of things that Anthropic says this is for. One, there's clearly a bunch of things for non-design knowledge workers, pitch decks and presentations, i.e. the core default asset of most knowledge work, and marketing collateral as a specific group that has to interact with design a lot, but who are not themselves necessarily designers. Secondly, though, the other sub-theme that's clear is that at least right now they are not trying to pitch this as the full end product.

4:21That's in contrast to something like Claude Code, where Anthropic is in no way at this point saying just use this to build your prototypes or your vibe-coded tests, and then you can go back to hand for the final version. Claude Code and Codex, by the way, and every agent decoding tool is pitching you on the full experience. And yet again, here when it comes to Claude Design, they're talking about realistic prototypes, product wireframes and mock-ups, and design explorations. I don't know to what extent that is, one, them not having as much confidence quite yet in the design product as opposed to the coding product, or two, a blow softener to other design tools in the field.

4:54One of the signals that we had in advance of the announcement of Claude Design that something was coming was that Anthropics Chief Product Officer Mike Krieger had resigned from the board of Figma earlier in the week, presumably because they were going to release something competing soon. That also, by the way, might explain why they chose to release this on Friday. It could have been something of a magnanimous act to try to soften the blow. That might be overthinking it, but it does feel like these companies have a good relationship. And while the meme is Anthropic trying to destroy everyone, it feels less like an intentional effort to disrupt existing players and more just a matter of they're going to build what they're going to build and if you're in the way, well, that's kind of on you.

5:28Now going back to the announcement, another thing that stands out is that they very clearly want this to be integrated into your overall company experience. They spend a lot of time emphasized that it can ingest your brand's design system. They highlight that you don't just have to start with a text prompt, you can also upload images or documents or even point it at your code base. And then there are a bunch of tools for making sure that whatever you produce can get to where it needs to go next, whether that's collaborating with someone else on your team, exporting it to a different type of artifact, or handing it off to Claude Code.

5:57Now, the launch of Claude Design gives more fodder for two broader conversations surrounding Anthropic right now. One is, what is the full suite of companies that is going to get in the way and be disrupted by Claude. But then secondly, zooming out and going even more broad in terms of the impact of AI on the broader job space, there is a question of how much the experience of AI's disruption and transformation of coding is likely to set a pattern for how AI disrupts other areas of knowledge work. Basically, we've gone from vibe coding being a thing just for weekend fun projects to agentic coding being simply the way that you code in just about a year and a half.

6:33And so if that is the pattern for all other knowledge work, obviously the disruption could be immense. As some folks have pointed out though, coding has a lot of elements that make AI particularly good at it. Clear rules, an objective way of knowing whether something was done right or wrong, and an easy ability to iterate to fix mistakes. A lot of other types of knowledge work people point out are much more messy and much more human, which may mean that the way that AI interacts with them looks a little bit different than its transformation of coding. Now on this question of what type of companies is Claude killing.

7:02The places where people naturally went were the other design tools in the space. Think Canva, Figma, tools like that. One thing that's interesting to note is that Canva's CEO, Melanie Perkins, is one of the named quotes on the launch of the Claude design page. And I don't think that that's just Cope. I actually think that while these tools both exist in the design space, they are a little bit different. So far in my experience with Claude design, I think a good division is to think about asset design versus systems design. Asset design is something like, I'm making an image, I'm making a post.

7:32Systems design is something more like, I'm making a website, an application, a front end. While Canva is certainly not unable to do systems design, in fact, a lot of their developments over the last couple of years have been more robustness in that set of features, such as your brand guidelines and templates, a lot of the use of Canva is much more specific and discreet to an individual asset, and that doesn't feel to me like what the core experience that they're going for with Claude Design is. Now, this probably makes sense, given the tight integration with the things that people build with Cloud Code, which tend to be less individual point assets and more systems like websites, applications, front ends, etc.

8:07In terms of who this is designed for, it doesn't feel like designers per se to me. So far, at least, it's much closer to a Vibe design product in the way that we talked about Vibe coding about a year ago than it is to some full-throated Figma replacement. The two audiences that stand out to me are, one, Cloud Code power users who aren't designers themselves. Witchier embodies this when they write, I live in Cloud Code. The visual half has always been the break in my flow. Spec something in words, lose context, re-explain it to Figma, etc. Cloud Design is the missing half. Draft UI inside Cloud with Opus 4.7 Vision, iterate by talking to it, and the handoff to Cloud Code pulls your design systems into context automatically.

8:46Design to implementation in one conversation instead of three tools. I don't think it would be totally off to view this as the primary intended use case for Claude design, at least initially, given how important and central to the strategy Claude code is. But as they found, a richer UI UX around design has benefits for others as well. The most frequently named category of person are marketers, which makes sense as the knowledge workers who have to interface with design and the visual most often. Austin Lau from Anthropic explicitly calls it one of the coolest features for marketers today. Austin writes, I've posted a lot about building marketing tools without being technical, and this is the visual side of that.

9:23I described a landing page editor and Claude built me one. So what are some of the things that people made in the first couple of days with this tool? Marketing assets are definitely one of the big themes. Salma, who focuses on AI for brands, generated an email marketing template. Victor Audie and many others did some version of animated social media posts. Many people experimented with rich visual web design. Mark Dalla Maria writes, Claude Design is insanely good. It one-shot this Artemis II moon launch site in a few minutes. And part of what I'd point out here is that Claude Design isn't using generated images from a model like Nano Banana or GPT Image.

10:01It's using code and SVGs to create the imagery, which, as we'll hear about in a minute, is a challenge for some, but also creates a lot of interesting opportunity for more interactive and more dynamic-feeling web experiences. Namia at Superfast says she just one-shotted her design agency homepage, and Justine Moore from A16Z built the entire frontend for an application. She writes,

10:30Also pointing out something which, as we will see, is one of the major frustrations with Claw Design, Justine also writes, On another note, I hit rate limits on my max plan in under 30 minutes. Another area of marketing where I saw a ton of people experimenting was around product websites. Now, you often see this as a test of new image generation models, where people will give the model a specific package and ask it to put that in various product photography contexts, or ask a new image model to generate packaging and product photography from scratch. Now again, Claude Design is not doing that, but what it can do is what Olivier here experimented with are things surrounding that product photography, like design variations for your Shopify page.

11:09Olivier used it here in the way that the blog post discussed, not just trying to create a good Shopify page for his product, but designing a set of four variations so they could figure out which was the best direction for the product. I also saw a ton of people experimenting with the video generation capability. People are making some pretty impressive launch and promo videos all generated with Claude Design without any separate image generation tool. So let's take a step back and talk about what I think are some of the most valuable features of Claude Design. First of all is something that I would call its robustness.

11:44If you are more of a consumer or prosumer type user and you've ever tried to create something comprehensive with a consumer or prosumer tool like Canva, you'll know that as much as they are trying to move into that space, creating something with a full design system can be really difficult. And that's exactly the type of thing that Claude Design excels at. Another thing that I really like is the Socratic design process. When you start in Claude Design and give it your initial prompt, for example, let's design a mobile app companion to the Context Portfolio Builder web app, add a screenshot. It's going to review what you gave it and then come back with a set of questions for refining it.

12:25Now, anyone who's interacted with AI to build something, especially Claude Code or Codex, will find this interactive pattern familiar, but it's re-skinned for design and at least so far in my experience, has done a good job of using the questions themselves to actually help you think through what you want. In other words, when you look at a question like what's the mobile app's main role, it isn't just a blinking cursor that asks you to input that, it gives you a half dozen theses that it has, which can actually help you refine your thinking. So for the mobile companion, it asks what the mobile app's main role is.

12:57Good question. Why do you need a mobile app for personal context building. The two that stand out are either quick capture, jot thoughts that feed into portfolio files, or notifications that are nudges to keep context fresh over time. Let's do quick capture and select notifications as well. Next up, it asks what's the number one flow to nail? Daily micro prompt or voice first capture? I think it's daily micro prompt. From there, it's going to ask you how many different iterations you want. For some, people will always want the max. For our case, let's leave it at its suggested three. And for any question where you don't have a strong feeling, you can simply allow it to decide for you.

13:31You can also see in this Socratic design process that Claude Design definitely has a technical bent. We're designing an app, and it's not just asking design questions, it's also asking product questions. For example, how important is voice input? Let's call it central. This is a voice-first app. Yes, there should be notifications. Mobile edit should live sync. And we'll let it decide what tweaks to expose. Now we'll let that work and keep talking about some of the other valuable features.

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17:26As was highlighted in their announcement post, there is a really strong emphasis on the idea of being able to have multiple variations to test things out. One of the things that I've got cooking that I mentioned at the beginning of this show as I'm exploring some approaches to AI credentialing to solve a bunch of problems I see that are stopping people from getting jobs and stopping companies from finding the right people to help them with AI. When I asked for a teaser video for this, it gave me three different directions that were differences in both the editorial content and narrative flow, as well as some of the visual systems.

17:57Another really valuable feature is the way that it does iterations. As I mentioned, you can use the text input panel to update the prompt. You can edit certain parts directly. You can provide inline comments that the AI can read. Or, and this is something that I'm seeing people really respond to, you can use the individual slider style tweaks that they provide on a design by design basis. So here's another project that I'm working on. One of the things that really bothers me about the AI jobs discourse right now is that people are so focused on the destructive side of creative destruction that they're not spending any time on thinking about what new jobs get created because of things that AI changes.

18:35I've been spending some time trying to game out where I think some of those jobs will exist and what their characteristics are and how many of them there might be, and turn that into this draft of a World's Fair-style expo for the jobs of the future. Over in the Tweak section, you can see I can change palette with just a single click, I can iterate on the layout, I can modulate how interactive it is, and I can automatically change the fonts. And people really love these sliders. The smart ape on Twitter, in fact, calls them the killer feature. They write, Everyone is talking about prompting, nobody talks about the sliders, which are generated per design.

19:09Spacing, density, color warmth, layout tightness, each one is built for your specific artifact. It's what makes this feel like a design tool and not a prompt box with a preview pane. Now there are some challenges though. Frequent AIDB guest and AIDB education collaborator Nufar Gaspar wrote that the three things that impressed her about claw design were these auto-generated tweaks, saying that this type of click-to-preview color swatch changes and other UX elements make, in her words, iteration feel radically different from every other AI design tool I've used. She also points out that the design system translation from examples is real, i.e.

19:43when you drop an existing branded deck in, even without a brand guide or a design.md file, Claw Design successfully extracted the visual language and stayed consistent across the new artifact. And finally, she says it keeps polishing on its own. After generating, it continues to iterate without being asked, fixing text overflows, inconsistencies, things it thinks it can improve. Feels like a designer doing a second pass before handing it over. However, Nufar points out that there are some challenges as well. One of the big ones for her was the exports. She had a ton of problems moving particularly slides into other formats.

20:18PowerPoints that didn't have the fonts that Claude used had significant quality degradation. She got error messages trying to move it over into Canva. She could export things as screenshots, but it was slow and not editable. Basically, the only export methodology that actually worked well was HTML. Simon Smith also pointed out that the lack of a native image generator does have limits. He writes, it doesn't have a native image generator as far as I can tell, so when it needs images, it will create SVGs. It's pretty good with SVGs, but this of course limits the type of images it can create. Still, for most people, the biggest limiter so far has certainly been the rate limiting.

20:52Josh Gonzalez says, oh, so Claude design has its own usage limit outside of everything else, and of course already hit it, so now I can't use it until next Friday? Okay. YouTuber Theo writes, really liking claw design so far, except for the fact that it just wiped out my project after burning 10 % of my usage. Greg Eisenberg from the Startup Ideas podcast found that for a lot of use cases it was really good. He gave wireframing a 9 out of 10, mobile app design an 8.5 out of 10, deck research and design a very specific 8.7 out of 10, and video creation a 4.5 out of 10. Effectively, while the video creation feature is novel and might be valuable in some specific contexts, it's certainly not replacing other video creation tools just yet.

21:35Speaking of which, what are the right comparisons for Claude Design? I mentioned Canva before, basically saying that I thought that they were slightly different. I don't know if Canva would agree with the characterization of them as an asset-first design tool as opposed to Claude Design's systems-first design, but that certainly reflects at least my usage. And what's more, Canva is just a much more full-sweeted tool at this point, with a lot of things that I have a hard time imagining that Claude will ever want to build into this. The more proximate comparison, and certainly the one that markets ran to, was with Figma.

22:05Now, part of that, of course, is because Mike Krieger left the board of Figma, but I still don't think it's exactly accurate. I think it's playing in some similar spaces, but for me, it feels closer to Figma for non-Figma users than a Figma replacement for existing Figma users. I kind of think that it brings a lot of what designers like about Figma into a package that's for people for whom Figma might be a little bit too much program. Now, maybe the market is right, and that's just a temporary state, and the immediate seven-point drop in Figma share price reflects where things go. But for now, like I said, it feels to me like the two audiences that Anthropic is pushing this towards are one, cloud coders, which will of course have some overlap with the people who currently use Figma, to the extent that those cloud coders don't have to collaborate with designers in the same way that they used to, and two, non-designer knowledge workers, particularly marketers.

22:55There is some overlap with Google Stitch, although I do think that Stitch is a lot closer to an AI native Figma experience than is cloud design. Where I really see the most comparison, at least in terms of direct challenges, are with the general agent tools GenSpark and Manus. Pretty much my main use case for these tools has been code-powered slide and visual design, and that's pretty much exactly what you can do with Claude Design now. Now, I certainly don't want to argue that just because my particular use case for GenSpark and Manus now has competition from Claude Design, that A, everyone's use cases are disrupted, or B, that those are even the most important use cases for GenSpark or Manus.