Intro

Over the past couple of weeks I have been spending time in the Claude Design preview, and the thing I keep coming back to is this: design is now accessible to anyone willing to spend a weekend playing around in it. I have never been great a ui/ux, but Claude Design has lower the barrier to entry for me and I have started to learn. I would love to see what a proper designed can do with this tool and I have seen some people make cool things over on X. Below are a couple of uses that I have done over the last few weeks.

Redesigning the Reminiscence App UI

The first project I put through Claude Design was a mobile app that I am building for people with dementia that I started building during a Google hackathon in January. The UI I shipped during the hackathon was functional but rough, and I had been wanting to take another pass at it. I gave Claude my existing UI as a starting point and asked it to upgrade the design. Once I landed on a version I actually liked, I had it generate a design system for the rest of the app(colors, typography, and components) so the whole experience could be brought up to the same level. The quality jump was big, and that really matters for an app whose users are elderly. Having a simple and clean UI was not optional in that context. Overall I am really happy with it and I hope that it is good enough to release so that one day I can have a proper designer make it even better.

I also used Claude to make a PowerPoint to showcase the app to a group of medical professionals. Same pattern, feed it the substance, let it handle the visual presentation. The slides were ready in a fraction of the time it would have taken me on my own, and they held up in front of a real audience.

Redesigned Reminiscence app theme generated in Claude Design

What I Like

A few things have stood out as I have been using it:

  1. It is a great on-ramp into design for someone who has little design experience.
  2. This is the AI-driven design format I have been wanting. I have tried tools like Google Stitch, but I didn’t like how it just generated static photos. Claude Design produces something I can actually iterate on inside a real workflow.
  3. It is good for more than UI and UX. PowerPoints, videos, and other visual deliverables work well too, as long as you bring high-quality content for it to work with.

What I Do Not Like Yet

It is a preview, so I am holding the rough edges loosely, but two things have bitten me:

  1. Claude Design has its own rate limit, separate from the rest of Claude, and you can burn through it quickly. Worth knowing before you start a long iteration session.
  2. I cannot manually edit a design once it is generated. If I try to tweak something by hand, the change gets sent back to Claude to redo, which uses tokens I was trying to save.

Wrapping Up

Despite a few small issues, I am really excited about this. The bar for entry-level design work just dropped to a weekend of playing around, and that opens the door for a lot of people who would not have called themselves designers before.

  • Zachary Witte