What changed in October
Since October, Claude Design works inside a normal Claude chat, and it is available on every plan, the free plan included. You can start or edit a design in the chat where you do the rest of your work, with a skill, from the design home screen, or by opening an existing design and using its chat.
Everything you make is now an artifact: a carousel, a slide deck, even your design system. An artifact is anything Claude makes that is more than plain text, such as a design, a dashboard or a landing page. Animations are artifacts too, but they deserve their own guide. This one sticks to static visuals.
The design system
Every template and every visual you make later is built on your design system. If the design system is off, everything after it is off too. It holds four things:
- Colors: your palette.
- Fonts: for headings and body text.
- Components: buttons, labels and cards.
- Layout: the grid and the spacing.
Claude builds it from material you already have: brand files, designs you made before, or a few screenshots of your website.
How close it gets
With a few screenshots, Claude gets you about 70 to 80% of the way. It copies the look well, but not exactly. If the design system has to match your website exactly, give it the source material: your Figma files or the original design elements, with the exact colors, fonts, font weights and spacing.
Build it once and publish it, so the whole team works from the same look. If you want it pixel perfect, let one designer in the team own it and keep improving it.
Making the templates
The design system tells Claude what your brand looks like. It does not tell Claude what a good carousel or a good blog cover looks like for you. That is the job of a template.
Claude Design no longer has built-in templates. Because everything is an artifact, you make your own: an artifact filled with dummy content that you reuse. This guide covers four formats:
- LinkedIn carousel: 1080 x 1350 per slide, exported as a PDF.
- Newsletter visuals: a header and section images, 600 px wide.
- Blog cover: 1200 x 630.
- Sales deck: 16:9, one idea per slide.
The same approach works for animations, in-store displays, Instagram posts and ad creatives. The starter prompt for each of the four templates is in the free download.
Why it looks like AI
When you describe the look in words like modern, clean or minimal, Claude has to guess. When it guesses, it picks the safest and most common choices: rounded cards, gradients and the look people recognise as AI.
Give it examples instead: designs you like, your own past work or screenshots. Claude copies a look you already like, and that gets you much closer to designs you can use.
Then iterate. Comment on the parts you don’t like and keep adjusting until it is right. When you are happy with the result, keep it as the template for that format.
From template to skill
A template on its own still means you explain every time how to fill it. So the next step is one skill per format. The skill holds the instructions for the task:
- The size and the export format.
- How many slides or images, and which types.
- How to fill each part.
- What not to do.
It also links to its template, so it always uses the right design.
Every design skill reads your brand context skill instead of copying it. The brand context skill holds your tone of voice, your audience and their pain points. So the brief decides what to say, the design skills decide how it looks, and the brand context skill decides how to say it. The prompts to turn each template into a skill are in the free download too.
One brief, the whole set
With everything in place, you open a campaign brief and ask for the whole set in one request. Each skill grabs its own template. The carousel skill makes the LinkedIn carousel, the newsletter skill makes the header and section images, and the blog cover skill makes the cover image.
The sales deck runs on its own input. The campaign brief feeds the campaign visuals. For a sales deck you start from your offer or a product page, and the same setup works for a sales presentation or a report for a client.
Where each visual goes
- Carousel: a PDF, straight to LinkedIn.
- Newsletter images: into your own email tool. Use the images only, because the HTML that Claude Design makes breaks in Outlook.
- Sales deck: download it as PowerPoint, PDF or Google Slides.
The four steps
- Design system: your look, set once.
- Templates: from good examples, one per format.
- Skills: one per format, each one fills its template.
- Visuals: one brief in, the whole set out.