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Welcome to the Friday edition of our newsletter. We spend Fridays going deeper into tools and trends related to generative AI (and Tuesdays sharing news updates). This week, Professor Snider (who spent the first six years of his career as a designer) takes Claude Design for a spin.

First AI came for the writers. Then it came for the developers. Now it's coming for the designers (and as a former designer myself, this one stings a bit).

Anthropic Labs just launched Claude Design, a new research preview product that turns your descriptions into polished, professional visuals in minutes.

Powered by the advanced Opus 4.7 vision model, this platform is designed to help anyone explore more creative directions faster than ever before.

Unlike the standard Claude chatbot, Claude Design is a separate web-based platform located at claude.ai/design. It is currently available to Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise subscribers.

The interface is split into a Design Library for organizing your assets and a suite of Design Creation Tools to start projects from scratch or use templates.

Claude Design isn't just for simple images. It’s a robust tool for complex professional projects:

Interactive Prototypes: Quickly turn static mockups into interactive, shareable prototypes for apps or websites to gather user feedback without writing a single line of code.

On-Brand Pitch Decks: Transform a rough outline into a complete, professional presentation that automatically adheres to your brand’s colors and fonts.

Dynamic Motion Graphics: Create animated videos to enhance storytelling or visualize data simply by describing the visual story you want to tell.

Marketing Collateral: Generate landing pages, social media assets, and one-pagers that look "launch-ready" in as little as 30 minutes.

What sets Claude Design apart is how it integrates with your existing workflow:

You can upload Figma files, logos, or even your existing codebase. Claude then builds a custom design system, ensuring every asset it generates is aligned with your brand identity.

You don't have to settle for the first draft. Use the "Comment to Claude" tool to click on specific screen elements and ask for refinements, or use manual adjustment knobs to tweak spacing and colors live.

Once you're happy with a design, you can export it to Canva, PDF, PowerPoint, or standalone HTML. You can even bundle it for Claude Code to begin the development phase immediately.

We uploaded our Innovation Profs branding to Claude Design and asked us to complete some three different design projects. Results were impressive, but not perfect.

First, we uploaded our brand information, including fonts and colors. Claude Design built design elements based on this information and gave us the option to make changes.

Now, we were ready to build. We began by asking for a one-page handout that explains our BRIEF method for prompting. The result was impressive, and it could make edits as we described.

The tricky part here was that the design was built with HTML, so we never actually got this the exact size needed for printing. When we exported to Canva, it was still HTML, so not ideal for editing there either.

Next we built a 10-slide presentation on the BRIEF method, which gave us some good ideas for improving the way we design our own slides. Here are four slides from that deck:

Finally, we made a video promoting what we do with Innovation Profs. The video was also built with HTML, so downloading is still a challenge. We had to record our screen to get this video:

Overall, Claude Design is impressive. If you take the time to set it up correctly (and we still have some work to do on this), this will be a huge time-saver for designers.

Because Claude Design is a powerful research preview, it consumes weekly usage quotas faster than the standard chat, especially for complex tasks like motion graphics.

Ready to start? Head over to claude.ai/design and try uploading a sketch or a simple 2-line prompt to see what happens.