Claude Design is a very useful tool for quick prototyping. It offers a lot of great features, such as the ability to use your design system when crafting design prototypes or relying on the full power of the latest Claude Opus model when building a new design.
Recently, Claude Design got a major update. With this upgrade, Anthropic solved its perhaps the most painful problem: token usage. Now, Claude Design uses the same token quota as regular Claude.
Claude Design Just Got a Major Update
Anthropic released a major Claude Design overhaul with design system imports, better design editing, and finally fixed…
When reviewing Claude Design, the design community typically focuses on its ability to create web and mobile prototypes. But Claude Design has a very interesting and super useful feature: Slides.
And in this article, I want to create a new slide deck using Slides, showing why and how you can use.
Why generate Slides in Claude Design?
Because we already have many tools for creating slides available on the market (including Figma Slides), it can be unclear why anyone should use Slides in Claude Design.
I found 3 reasons for that:
- Reduce manual work. Claude Design will generate a first draft of your slide deck for you. You send a prompt and Claude will do the rest.
- Use your design system. The great thing about Claude Design is that it uses your design system when crafting prototypes. The same approach applies to Slides. The slides will also be created using your design system, which means that the visual style of your slide deck will match the style of your brand.
- It’s easy to fine-tune the design according to your needs. The slide deck can be refined either manually or with the help of AI to align with your needs.
Now, let me show the process of creating a new slide deck from scratch in 5 steps.
Step 1: Prompt Claude Design to create a new slide deck
The first step is straightforward: prompt Claude Design to create new slides. For that, I will choose the Slides template and my design system from the Design system.
Quick note: Roxy Design system that I use in my example is a slightly modified version of the famous IBM Carbon Design system.
Prompting Claude Design to create a slide deck for me.
Step 2: Answer Claude’s questions to help AI create a proper context for slides
Similar to the process of creating design prototypes, Claude Design will analyze your prompt, match it with your design system (you can spot it in the left side bar chat below), and then ask you some clarification questions to create a better context for this task.
The only tricky question in this list is the last one: “ Want variations of the look?” In my experience, it’s always better to choose a single variant, as it will make Clade Design work more focused and help you achieve a better quality of the output.
Answering contextual questions about our slide deck to create a better context for Claude Design.
Step 3: Review the first draft of your slide deck and introduce targeted changes
The process of generating a simple slide deck like the one I’ve created took a few minutes and 8% of my weekly usage quota.
Claude Design has a dedicated view for your slide deck so you can navigate slides and introduce tailored changes. As you can see from the video I’ve shared below, Claude used many attributes of the IBM Carbon system when crafting the slide deck (colors, typography, spacing, etc).
The great thing about Claude Design is that it makes it super easy to change text on slides. In my example, I’ve clicked Edits and changed the text on the Intro slide.
First draft of our slide deck is ready for our review. We can click Edit and change the text in real time.
Step 4: Introducing more advanced changes
Apart from changing text on slides, Claude Design has a dedicated view that allows you to change the visual attributes of individual elements. You can change font, spacing (margin/padding), and color of individual elements by selecting an individual group and playing with its settings.
We can edit styles of individual elements — by selecting a particular element or entire group it belongs to.
But in my experience, this is not the most comfortable way of changing styling because a particular group could be nested deep, or sometimes, for no apparent reason, a particular visual attribute can be changed right away. For example, in my video, you can see that I’ve changed the color of the background, but it didn’t apply to the slide’s object.
Another downside of the editing approach is that you don’t have complete freedom when moving objects around on the canvas. Often, you can move the object only to the predetermined position on the slide. I believe this happens because Slides is a code-first product (meaning that it’s a web layout adapted for the format of a slide).
Claude Design doesn’t allow you to freely move the object on the canvas. You can position the object only in designated areas.
Step 5: Major tweaks
Finally, you can use Tweaks to introduce more advanced changes to the slides. For example, below I show how to turn a flat illustration on the slide into a pseudo-3D object.
Writing prompt for a major styling tweak.
In my example, Claude Design built me a dedicated widget that makes it possible to switch the image styling.
Quick note: When Tweak works, Claude tends to rebuild the entire slide deck, not just the particular slide you ask it to introduce changes to. This takes extra time and leads to high token consumption (in my case, it used the same amount of token quota as for creating the initial slide deck draft).
Claude Design created a style widget for me.
On Token consumption
I’ve spent 21% of my Claude daily usage quota on 5 steps mentioned above which, to be fair, is still a bit high but nowhere near the previous version of Claude Design.
Token consumption by Claude Design.
Conclusion
I think that Claude Design has great potential to become a very useful and valuable tool in a designer’s toolkit in the future. But right now, many Claude Design features feel half-baked, including Slides that I’ve described above. Looking forward to seeing the next Claude Design release.
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