The backstory makes it even sharper — Anthropic's CPO had been sitting on Figma's board and stepped down days before the announcement. Connect the dots yourself.

But Claude Design isn’t just a Figma competitor. It’s one piece of a much bigger play. Anthropic now has Claude Code handling the engineering layer, Claude Design owning the visual layer, and Claude Cowork running the documents-and-operations layer. They’re not building tools. They’re replacing the entire white collar professional output stack — and the common thread underneath all of it is that every deliverable you produce at work (decks, prototypes, videos, reports) is really just code wearing a costume. And code just got radically cheap to generate.

If you ship any kind of professional output — pitch materials, product mockups, client presentations, marketing assets — the distance between your idea and a polished deliverable just shrank to a conversation.

Here’s what nobody warns you about, though. Claude Design is powered by Opus 4.7, Anthropic’s heaviest vision model, and it chews through your usage allocation at a brutal pace.

I torched nearly a third of my weekly quota building a single design system and pitch deck.

Unfocused prompts that need two or three regeneration rounds? That’s quota you don’t get back. Generating wireframes when you already know the layout you want? Pure waste. Without a deliberate workflow, you’ll exhaust your limit before you produce anything worth keeping.

So I built the workflow. Over the past two weeks, I constructed an entire startup brand — an AI orchestration app called OrchestratorAI — using nothing but Claude Design. Clickable prototype. Investor deck. Animated launch video. A reusable design system that keeps every future artifact visually consistent. Zero external design tools. Zero design experience required.

This post is the full playbook: three practical use cases you can reproduce this weekend, one advanced setup that compounds your output, and a GitHub repo with every prompt and template ready to fork.

Let’s get into it.

Here’s what I want to cover today

1. A brief overview

2. Foundation Setup - Logo concepts, brand Guideline and Color Platte

3. Design System

4. Use Case 1 — Wireframe + App Design

5. Use Case 2 — Animated Launch Video

6. Use Case 3 — Fundraising Pitch Deck

7. Four learnings from Claude Design

8. How Claude Design augment your design not replace it + Bonus Github templates

1. A brief overview

Navigate to claude.ai/design and you land on an interface with four tabs. Most of your time will live in two of them.

The first is Prototype — this is where you generate interactive, clickable product screens. App flows, signup sequences, landing pages, anything you’d normally mock up before showing a stakeholder. You’ll see two fidelity options when you start: wireframe and high-fidelity.

Skip wireframe. It consumes the same amount of your usage allocation but produces throwaway output you’ll rebuild anyway.

I wasted 4% of my weekly budget generating wireframes for OrchestratorAI’s landing page, realized I already had the structure mapped in my head, and deleted everything. Start at high-fidelity. Always.

The second is Slide Deck — this is your presentation builder. Fundraise pitches, quarterly reviews, strategy proposals, client-facing briefs. There are two settings worth understanding before you start. One controls whether you’re pulling from a saved design system (your brand colors, fonts, and layout rules — I’ll walk you through creating one in Use Case 3). The other toggles speaker notes. Flip that on when you’re presenting live and want sparse, visual-first slides with talking points generated underneath. Leave it off when the deck needs to travel on its own — those slides come out text-heavier so they make sense without narration.

The remaining two tabs (templates and others) are useful eventually, but not worth exploring until you’ve built muscle memory with the first two.

Here’s the part that caught my attention: before April 17, making a clickable prototype and making a branded presentation required completely separate toolchains. You’d pick from Lovable, Replit, Bolt, or Figma Make for prototypes, then switch to Gamma, Keynote, or Google Slides for decks. Separate apps, separate learning curves, separate file formats. Claude Design merges all of that into a single surface — and every artifact you create can inherit the same visual identity automatically when plugged into the right design system.

It also handles animated videos, one-pagers, and marketing visuals. But the design language and deck workflows are where you’ll spend 80% of your time. Master those first. Everything else in this post builds on them.

2. Foundation Setup - Logo concepts, brand Guideline and Color Platte

Before I started diving straight into Claude design, I utilized sites like Dribbble, Higgsfield, or Pinterest for logo inspirations.

For design system inspirations, https://refero.design/ provides ton of UI and ready made mockups that can be used immediately.

What I like most is in https://styles.refero.design/, it provides a full baked MD design system files across prominent tech companies that extracted out the Color Platte, Typography, spacing and shapes, Guidelines and Components Preview.

One thing I noticed is that the tokens burn through fast in Claude Design so it is more preferable to brainstorm a design system outside the tool before bringing the specs into Claude Design.

For OrchestrateAI (a unified AI workspace that lets users access and switch between multiple AI models in one seamless chat experience without losing context), I brainstormed both ideas in Claude Sonnet and ChatGPT to see how they compare to each others.

While brainstorming the brand system with logo concepts and color platte in claude, the output quality is still quite low compare with GPT newest Image Gen model.

Same prompt but put in ChatGPT, the logo quality is 2x higher than Claude. What I like most about GPT new model is the ability to generate symmetric geometric shapes that looks more production quality graded than the Claude.

I was able to narrow into option 5 with few more iterations and generate an end to end MD file that contains the Mission, Audience, Color palette, Typography, Logo concept meaning, Logo usage, Voice & tone and Brand board layout direction.

Once everything is set in place, I fire up Claude Design to input the design system MD file.

3. Design System

Every use case I’ve walked through so far produces a standalone artifact. That’s useful. But here’s what turns Claude Design from a novelty into an actual production workflow: the design system.

A design system in Claude Design is a saved profile that tells every future generation exactly how your brand should look — colors, typography, layout preferences, component patterns, logo placement. Set it up once, and every prototype, deck, and video you build afterward inherits the same visual DNA automatically. My tenth OrchestrateAI artifact took a fraction of the time my first one did, because I never had to re-explain the brand.

Here’s exactly how I built the OrchestrateAI design system, step by step.

Step 1: Define your company identity.

The setup screen opens with a single text field asking for your company name and a short description of what you do. This isn’t just metadata — Claude Design actually reads this to make decisions about visual tone, layout density, and component choices. The more precisely you describe your product, the more coherent the visual output becomes. Vague descriptions produce generic-looking artifacts.

Step 2: Upload your visual assets.

Below the description field, you’ll find upload areas for fonts, logos, and brand assets. I dragged in two files: a product screenshot showing OrchestrateAI’s dashboard interface, and a logo/wordmark PNG. Claude Design uses these as visual anchors — it studies the color palette in your screenshots, matches the weight and style of your wordmark, and applies those patterns across everything it generates. If you already have a landing page or an existing app, screenshot the parts you like most and drop them here. You’re giving the model a visual reference point instead of trying to describe “modern, clean, minimal” in words (which produces a different result every time).

Step 3: Feed it the detailed notes.

This is the step most people skip — and it’s the one that matters most for consistency. At the bottom of the setup screen, there’s an open text field labeled “Any other notes?” I pasted an entire markdown document I generated above into this field.

Once all three steps are filled in, hit “Continue to generation” and Claude Design builds your system. From that point forward, every new prototype or deck you create can pull from this saved profile through the Design System dropdown.

Step 4: Review and Fine Tune

Once the design system finished generating, Claude will prompt you to review all the sections one by one to make sure the design is consistent with the MD file. What I like most is the ability to progressively disclose each section and review them thoroughly.

Few Things to note:

Claude Design is not able to extract out the fonts directly from the MD file I provide so I need to upload it from font book directly. The initial color scheme is very limiting (only has neutral black color) and I need to include other hex colors to make the color system more comprehensive.

What the ultimate output looks like:

UI Kit — App & Marketing. Two separate kits tailored to different surfaces. The App UI Kit contains the full component library for your product interface — the screens, layouts, and interaction patterns your prototype will draw from. The Marketing Site UI Kit covers your public-facing pages — landing pages, pricing tables, feature sections.

Type. Typography definitions split into monospace (for code-heavy or technical interfaces) and a type scale mapping your heading hierarchy, body text, captions, and labels. Every size, weight, and line-height decision is made once here and inherited everywhere.

Colors. Three layers: accents and semantic colors (success green, error red, warning amber — the functional colors your UI needs), a full palette (your primary, secondary, neutral, and surface colors with every shade), and gradients. Claude Design derived most of these from the product screenshot and logo I uploaded.

Components. Pre-built patterns for badges and pills, buttons (with hover/active/disabled states), cards, input fields, and navigation elements. These are the building blocks every future prototype pulls from. When you generate a new screen, Claude Design assembles it from these pieces rather than inventing new ones each time.

Brand. Logo usage rules (sizing, clearspace, placement on dark vs. light backgrounds) and voice and tone guidelines. Yes — it even generates writing direction for your brand, not just visual rules.

The whole system also produces a README-style skill file at the top — a structured markdown document that serves as the single source of truth for your brand. Think of it as the instruction manual a contractor would read before building anything for your company. I’ve included mine in the GitHub repo as a starting template you can adapt.

Beware of usage limit

Generating the full end to end design system burns through tokens fast. A mere 1-2 iterations on top of the output has spent more than 93% of the tokens in the Pro Plan. So generating more mockups will require a upgrade to Max Plan.

4. Wireframe and App Design

Step 1: Brainstorm and ideate

When you're exploring a product idea that doesn't exist yet and you genuinely don't know what the interface should feel like, low-fidelity wireframes become a brainstorming tool, not a design deliverable. That's exactly where I started with OrchestrateAI with the prompt below:

Base on this wireframe, create a simple chat experience to show how OrchestrateAI allows the user to select the best model base on their use cases

Core user flow:

1. User starts a chat in one interface.

2. User selects a model manually or lets OrchestrateAI recommend the best model.

3. The response streams instantly, so words appear as the model generates.

4. User switches models mid-thread without losing context.

5. UI shows each model’s cost per token, strengths, and best use cases.

What surprised me was how Claude Design responded. Instead of immediately generating screens, it asked follow-up questions — about the interaction logic, the information hierarchy, edge cases I hadn't considered. It was functioning more like a design partner than a rendering engine.

After I filled in those gaps, I asked it to produce six distinct layout approaches with tradeoffs ranked across four dimensions: switching speed, catalog browsability, mid-thread ergonomics, and cost/capability visibility.

I landed on an inline dropdown anchored to the input field with a full modal picker accessible underneath — the option that scored highest on the metrics that actually mattered for the core workflow.

Step 2: Move to high fidelity with a structured prompt.

Once the direction was clear, I wrote a detailed prompt covering context, target persona, primary goal, the complete user flow, and key interaction states.

That single prompt generated an end-to-end experience — from selecting a model in the dropdown to viewing the full model catalog to streaming a response with context preserved across switches.

One structured prompt got me roughly 80% of the finished design.

Step 3: Refine without burning tokens.

This is where most people waste their allocation. Claude Design has three refinement tools, and two of them cost you nothing.

Direct Edit lets you click into any element on the canvas — text, spacing, colors, component properties — and modify it by hand. No generation, no tokens consumed.

Draw lets you sketch a rough wireframe or annotation directly on the screen, which Claude interprets and converts into a prompt for the next generation cycle. For quick spatial changes (”move this sidebar narrower,” “add a section here”), drawing is faster than typing.

Comments work like Figma annotations — drop a note on any element and Claude addresses it in the next render. And Tweaks is the only token-spending option of the four, toggling specific UI properties to see real-time generated variations.

The order matters: direct edit first (free), draw for spatial adjustments (free), comments for specific fixes (light token spend), tweaks last for exploratory variations (heavier spend). Work in that sequence and your quota stretches dramatically further.

5. Animated Launch Video

This is the use case that catches most founders and designers off guard. You can generate animated product videos — with motion graphics, scene transitions, and branded visuals — directly inside Claude Design. No After Effects. No Jitter. No motion designer on retainer.

I produced a 60-second animated launch video for OrchestrateAI using three ingredients: a structured prompt I drafted in ChatGPT, Claude Design’s built-in animated video skill, and an open-source HyperFrames skill from HeyGen. Total time from blank canvas to finished video: under six minutes.

Step 1: Build your video brief externally.

Don’t ideate inside Claude Design — that’s quota you can’t recover. I opened ChatGPT and structured my prompt around six elements: the goal of the video, the core message, the target audience, a scene-by-scene breakdown with timestamps, the visual style I wanted, and editing rhythm notes (pacing, transitions, text animation preferences). My OrchestrateAI script ran 13 scenes in 60 seconds — opening hook, problem framing, product reveal, feature walkthrough across five capabilities, a social proof beat, and a waitlist CTA. The full prompt template is in the GitHub repo.

Prompt structure: Goal + Core message + Target audience + Video structure + Visual style + Editing style

Step 2: Layer in the right skills before generating.

This step is the difference between a mediocre render and something you’d actually share. When you paste your prompt into Claude Design,

• hit Import and attach two things from the Skills and Design Systems panel: your saved design system (so the video inherits your brand’s colors, typography, and visual identity) and the animated video skill (which gives Claude the motion design vocabulary to produce fluid transitions).

Import into Claude with relevant skills
After you import the prompt into Claude design, select animated video from Skills and design systems which will increase the quality of the video.

Select Import → Skills and Design System → Use both Orchestrate Design System + animated video skill so that the animated video followed design consistency with animations.

For an additional quality jump, grab the HyperFrames skill. Follow the steps to add the HyperFrames skills:

1. Go to this page on GitHub

2. Click the “Download raw file” button (the ↓ arrow icon near the top-right of the file viewer)

3. Save the .md file to your computer

4. Attach that file to the Claude design message, and then describe the video you want to build

That single markdown file is the entire HyperFrames skill for Claude Design — it contains the skeletons, animation patterns, shader transition catalog, and all the rules Claude needs to generate a valid HyperFrames composition as an HTML artifact. You don’t need the rest of the repo for the Claude Design workflow.

Step 3: Expect the first render to be rough — then fix it fast

My initial output landed at maybe 50% of where it needed to be. Logos were mispositioned, text overlapped with UI screenshots in several scenes, and the title typography wasn't legible at the sizes Claude chose. But the structure — scene sequencing, timing, narrative arc — was already solid.

Three rounds of comments brought it to a version I’d confidently share with investors and post on social media. The bulk of the refinement was spatial: adjusting where elements sit relative to each other, not rethinking the creative direction.

Here’s the honest framing: this isn’t a Pixar-quality commercial. It’s a motion-graphics-style product walkthrough — the kind of asset that used to require a week of back-and-forth with a freelance animator and a few thousand dollars in budget.

For investor updates, product launches, social content, and internal alignment videos, six minutes and zero additional spend is a radically different equation.

6. Fundraising Pitch Deck

If you’re raising capital, you need a deck that tells a tight story in under 20 slides. I built the OrchestrateAI investor deck — 18 slides, fully branded, with speaker notes — using the same workflow pattern from the previous two use cases. The output looked like something a Series A startup would send to Sequoia. Because that’s exactly who I wrote it for.

Step 1: Draft your narrative structure in ChatGPT first.

Same principle as the video: don’t burn Claude Design quota on figuring out what to say. I used ChatGPT to iterate on a detailed prompt that specified the goal (raise venture funding), the audience (sophisticated VC partners), the deck objective, a company overview, and a slide-by-slide narrative arc.

My structure covered 18 slides: cover, vision and mission, problem, why now, solution, a product walkthrough sequence, competitive landscape, business model, traction and early signals, team, roadmap, financials, and the ask. Each slide had bullet-level guidance on what to communicate and what visual approach to take. That upfront work is what separates a coherent fundraising narrative from a jumble of branded rectangles.

Step 2: Create the deck with your design system loaded.

Navigate to the Slide Deck tab, name your project, and select your saved design system from the dropdown — mine pulled in OrchestrateAI’s full visual identity automatically. I turned the speaker notes toggle ON for this deck.

That’s a deliberate choice: with notes enabled, Claude generates sparser, more visual slides and writes the supporting narrative as separate talking points underneath. The result reads like a deck designed for a live pitch rather than a text-heavy document someone reads in their inbox.

Every slide came out inheriting the deep-space background, violet accents, and monospace typography from my design system without me referencing any of it in the prompt.

Step 3: Refine strategically — and know what costs you.

The initial generation nailed the narrative flow and visual consistency. Where I spent refinement time was on layout precision — padding between elements, logo placement on individual slides, and ensuring the competitive landscape table rendered cleanly.

Here’s the practical tradeoff I learned: the Tweaks feature is seductive because you see changes instantly, but it consumes tokens on every toggle. Comments are more efficient for targeted corrections — drop a note on a specific slide saying “tighten the spacing between the header and the comparison table” and Claude addresses it in a single re-render. Direct edit remains free for any text or spacing adjustment you can handle manually.

The export flexibility is worth mentioning. Once you’re satisfied, Claude Design lets you export as an editable PowerPoint file (native text and shapes, not flattened images), a print-ready PDF, or a pixel-perfect PPTX screenshot export. There’s also a direct send-to-Canva option if that’s your team’s workflow.

One honest note: the deck still had minor padding inconsistencies on a few slides that required manual cleanup after export. It’s not pixel-perfect out of the box on every single frame.

But the gap between “generated output” and “investor-ready deck” was maybe fifteen minutes of manual adjustment — a fundamentally different equation than building 18 slides from scratch.

7. Four learnings from Claude Design

After building every OrchestrateAI artifact covered in this post — plus a dozen more I didn’t include — here are four lessons that would have saved me significant time and money if I’d known them on day one.

1. Protect your token budget ruthlessly. Claude Design on the Pro plan will drain your entire weekly allocation on a single design system build if you’re not careful.

The fix is straightforward: do all your ideation and prompt drafting outside of Claude Design. I used ChatGPT Sonnet for brainstorming and prompt structuring — it’s cheaper and perfectly suited for that phase.

When you do generate inside Claude Design, batch your changes. Don’t submit one tweak at a time. Accumulate five or more modifications into a single comment or prompt update. And frontload context — the more specific your initial prompt, the fewer regeneration cycles you’ll need. Every vague instruction costs you a round trip on Opus 4.7.

2. Declare your visual constraints before the first generation.Claude Design will hallucinate UI details if you don’t tell it what not to do. Across my sessions, I encountered the same recurring issues: product logos used incorrectly or placed over busy backgrounds, font sizes that weren’t legible at slide scale, color combinations that clashed, and UI elements overlapping in the animated video.

Once I added explicit constraints to my initial prompt — “never overlay text on the product screenshot,” “minimum 18px font for body text,” “logo must appear on solid backgrounds only” — those problems disappeared across every subsequent artifact. Set these rules once in your design system notes and they propagate to everything.

3. Source your design system from proven references. Instead of inventing your visual identity from scratch, go to Dribbble, Behance, or Refero Design and find products with a visual direction you admire. Extract the patterns — color ratios, typography pairings, spacing rhythms, component styles — and encode them into a structured markdown file that Claude Design can parse. You’re giving the model a battle-tested visual foundation rather than asking it to guess what “professional” means.

4. Use artifacts to align faster — whether you have a designer or not. For founders without a design team, sharing a generated wireframe or deck communicates your vision far more precisely than any written brief. For teams that already have designers, Claude Design doesn’t eliminate their role — it elevates it. Designers shift from executing basic UI production to making strategic decisions about systems, custom animation patterns, and complex interaction flows.

They can also use it to generate twenty directional options in minutes, share them with stakeholders, and converge on the strongest direction before investing craft time. The tool compresses the exploration phase, not the thinking.

8. How Claude Design augment your design not replace it + Bonus Github templates

Claude Design is now competing across multiple categories — Figma for prototyping, Gamma for decks, Lovable for app building, Jitter for motion. It doesn’t beat all of them at their own game. Figma is still unmatched for shipping mature products with edge cases across dozens of screens. Lovable still deploys functional apps. Dedicated motion tools still offer finer keyframe control.

What Claude Design wins on — decisively — is speed to shareable artifact. Fastest path from idea to branded prototype, deck, or video you can put in front of another person. And the pipeline to Claude Code is uniquely powerful: hand off a prototype directly for implementation with visual decisions preserved end to end. Nothing else connects those layers this cleanly.

The mental model: Claude Design is your first design hire. Not your design department. Zero to one — then bring in specialized tools for one to ten.

The GitHub template

Everything from this post is packaged into a repo you can fork now: the OrchestrateAI design system markdown, prompt templates for all three use cases, the ChatGPT brainstorming prompts, and a quickstart README. Swap in your company name and brand assets — working prompt library in under ten minutes.

Final words

Here’s what I keep coming back to after two weeks of building inside Claude Design.

The founders who pull ahead over the next two years won’t be the ones who test every new AI tool for a day and move on. They’ll be the ones who build reusable systems — design systems, prompt libraries, template repos — that let each new tool compound their output instead of starting from scratch every time.

That’s what this entire post is about. Not “look at this cool thing Claude Design can do.” But:

here’s how to set up infrastructure that makes every future artifact faster, more consistent, and more professional than the last one.

Your move:

1. Fork the GitHub repo → [template link]. It takes two minutes. Swap in your company name, your logo, and your colors.

2. Pick one workflow and build something this weekend. If you’re fundraising, start with the pitch deck. If you’re launching, start with the video. If you’re exploring a product idea, start with the wireframe.

3. Reply to this email with what you built. I’ll feature the best examples in next week’s issue.

Next week: I will dive deeper into another popular personal agent Hermes and how to set it up as part of the Personal Agent Series. Don’t miss it.