Claude Design

If I'm building out an internal tool for, say, a hospital lawyer to search through malpractice lawsuits, I want my tool to be the most familiar, obvious, least-surprising UI/UX possible. Just stay out of the way and do what it's supposed to do.

The trick is, of course, that the human is still responsible for knowing when homogenous is fine, or when there's real value in the presentation. If you're making a website for, say, a VST plugin for musicians, your site may need to have a little more "pizzazz" to make your product more attractive to the target audience.

90+% of attempts at making a truly unique or mind-blowing UI produce a mind-blowingly bad UI. For 0.5 seconds of wow factor, you've added substantial unnecessary friction. Outside of art projects where that wow factor is the point, it really should not be attempted, most certainly not by someone without the appropriate skillset.

The old skool artisanal weirdness was not a purposeful stylistic choice, it was a bunch of people trying to do the best they could with crappy tools. There may be some je ne sais quoi which is lost with the shift to mass adoption, but the reason for the mass adoption of these particular design trends was that they were objectively superior.

Which is exactly what I want. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get a competent UI?

Why do people celebrate consistency and uniformity in desktop apps, wanting to crucify developers for not following platform idioms and guidelines... and then suddenly want things that are "truly unique" or "mind-blowing" or "artisanal weirdness" when it comes to a web app?

A competent UI with little effort is a godsend.

This is exactly what I want in a UI.

The hilarious thing is that I would be willing to bet than in a decade, it's STILL a massive shitshow in enterprise. That's because the problem with enterprise software is not that good design is all that difficult to pull off (it just requires caring!) It's that the people making enterprise software have terrible taste and can't even see (I am convinced) that the thing they built is ugly and hard-to-use.

Or “2000s aesthetic” for something before Web 2.0 (although you’ll get a generic 2000s aesthetic unless you provide more detail).

I guess post IPO, after the insiders cash in out of lock period its irrelevant.

Sure, some prototypes will be spun up more quickly. But if this was a real problem large companies faced it would have been solved in software already.

AI companies: "good news, everyone! We've automated all those steps so they're even easier to generate!"

I think the same thing is happening in physical construction. Ah, I see you've designed a new box with four primary color tones and slightly offset vertical lines to break up the windows.

but does it still exists? Even without AI everyone is utilizating the same css frameworks, same libraries and templates... design is pretty much boring these days. CSS Zen Garden anyone?

You might just as well bemoan the homogeneity of Windows 95 apps. All those gray buttons in the bottom right of windows.

The shelf-life of unique and mindblowing has reduced to a week (being generous) before it's copied by slop artists looking for a resume booster or funding, and months tops before it's part of training data for everyone. Unless you find it in that small time window everything will seem homogenous.

It could just be a systemic result; unless you deliberately take the lonely road to parts of the internet where other people aren't, you will not see unique and mind blowing things. Which by definition you can't source from a place that has a lot of users, like social media or popular forums.

I think it's because Steve Jobs killed Flash.

In a direction where the AI model basically serves you everything live. No sites, no front end, just databases and model embodying them.

I mean why even code anything in the future where it is cheap and fast enough to just come up with everything each time based on each user need.

I am not saying it’s good but it’s lazy. And if one thing is for certain is that laziness prevails. Some even mistake it for progress.

But then, is human programming language really the most optimal way for an ai to steer the silicon? Some kind of bare AI OS with kernel, drivers and there in the middle a fat specialised asic ai chip to orchestrate everything.

This is most every corporate website.

This comment is just a rehash of the increasingly outdated and incorrect assertion that LLMs can't possibly exhibit any creativity -- and it's also incorrect.

If you're yearning for "old skool artisanal weirdness of yore", look up the trend on Twitter a month or two ago of people asking Claude to make YTPs. They ended up very weird and artisanal in a way distinct from how any human would do it.

Except it is. Plenty of places will say this is all good enough and not hire, or even lay off, the UI/UX person. I've seen this firsthand.

This is just a really cool way of building.

I'm impressed. I tried Google Stitch but it was slow and useless. Sad, because Gemini has a pretty good creative flair, ironically enough.

If every designer takes less time to do their job, you need less designers. There’s no getting around that simple math.

Now, if I could only get a model to draw arch diagrams....

2. Long term you can expect the minimum bar for aesthetically pleasing design to be raised and there to be overall less demand for human produced generic design.

3. This will mean all designers get pushed into the same corner or complex, unique, uninferable design and trying to fight it out.

Figma is targeted towards designers who create thoughtful design systems and cohesive UIs and who don't code, while this is targeted towards vibe coders who can't design. Two different circles that intersect to some level.

But like you said, if anthropic adds the tools in Figma, only then they can can take customers from Figma IMO.

https://stitch.withgoogle.com/

I'm now pasting all my Stitch output into Claude Design to see what happens.

edit: First impressions are great. It asked me a ton of really great questions about my design aspirations and direction, which were incredibly relevant and insightful. Waiting to see what it makes.

edit2: It did astonishingly well with the first design pass. Really outstanding. This is probably going to be my primary prototyping tool until the Next Best Thing(tm) drops in a few weeks.

They're down 80% over the last year. Ouch.

Figma actually put the work in to make a great product that performs well and offers anything you could imagine to design just about anything you need, with AI integrations and deep manual editing to sweat the details.

What if you don’t give a shit about design and it’s a means to an end for a project that involves something different that you do care about?

I'm an engineer who also loves design. I've read a lot of the books (including the one referenced), I know some concepts and terminology, and I understand the general process — but I'll never be a professional designer. My knowledge is limited, and I find most design tools so complex they actually get in the way of problem exploration and creativity.

For people like me, this tools removes the friction which actually prevents me from being more focused on the valuable parts of the design process. I can more easily discover and learn new concepts, and ultimately spend more time being creative and exploring the problem space.

This speed and variation wins for me. But yes without a designers eye laziness can get lost in slop design too..

To me the value of Gen Ai is an accelerant (not slop factory) for ideation and solutions not a replacement of the human owning the process.. but laziness ususally wins

when people wax philosophical/poetical about what is essentially capital production already i'm always so perplexed - do you not realize that you're not doing art/you're not an artisan? your labor is always actively being transformed into a product sold on a market. there are no "marvelous human experiences", there is only production and consumption.

> They’ll be impoverished and confuse output with agency

ironic.

Designing a user inteface involves thousands of small decisions. When trading off pros/cons for each of these decisions, in 99% of the cases, the right answer is ‘optimize familiarity.

That’s why Android and iOS look the same, and why the small differences between them are where contention happen.

If you adopt existing patterns, your users would be instantly familiar with your app, and the design will not get in their way.

If you want to make a GUI, it should be familiar. Extremely familiar. It shouldn't invent new ways to interact most of the time.

It is well-known that "intuitive" in UX almost always means "what I'm used to". If you're regularly "innovating" in UI design, you may be making the product harder to use, maybe much harder to use.

It certainly isn't unheard of for new ways to interact with computers to be better than the old, but they are usually tied to new physical aspects of our tools: Touchscreens needed new ways to interact, and maybe there's still some room for creativity there, but not much. The mouse obviously required innovative ideas for several years. But, also, the odds of your wacky new idea being the right way to change how people interact with computers are pretty low, unless you're working at FAANG and have a UX research team and budget to test it.

You can get creative in how it looks, but you cannot get creative in how it works.

"Good designers will reject this."

^ Famous last words.

Jeez I hope fewer designers think like this (and if it's a traditional wisdom among designers, I hope fewer designers in general.) Perhaps web apps will stop moving their icons and buttons around every six months.

I have no idea how everything will play out, but this sounds a lot like the people saying "good programmers will reject this" six months ago.

Quite apart from anything else, it ignores the fact that—particularly within large organisations—designers (and programmers) frequently have very little say in the matter.

I guess that kind of thinking got us liquid glass - which everyone hates.

Not everyone is looking for unique design, 70% of the web is still using Wordpress. I would say majority prefer familiarity and appreciate uniqueness.

You’re talking about art, not design.

most of those "breakthroughs" were just constraint hacks. no room for a reload button. no room for another menu.

enterprise buyers don't pay for counterintuitive. they pay so the new hire finds save without training.

Until we have embodied AI's with eyes and hands that provide good enough approximations, the aspect of design bottlenecked on human experience will stay bottlenecked.

If you want to talk in absolutes, I'd say the best design is the one that results in the desired behaviour of your audience.

Overall after being laid off in January and a 17 year UX Research/Design/Dev career Im starting school in my early 50s to change careers.

Even the most deluded AI bulls don't say that AI is even meant to replace the best that humanity has to offer

This is for non-designers to crank out slop with less effort. They can still be swayed by all the shiny knobs to feel in control.

While Great design breaks the mould, Very Good design is about surfacing the most expected outcomes for any action which reduces friction and lets people get work done. And this generation of Generative tools is very good at identifying the most common/most expected response to a prompt.

Those partnerships and the MCP were intentionally always watered down. It was purely a play for some cheap exposure without providing anything meaningful.

The very obvious thing for the MCP to expose, that everyone asks for, is to be able to create and edit Figma designs. You can't, likely because they're scared it will kill their product. It's one way: Figma->Agent, no Agent->Figma. They will come around to this one day, potentially when it's already too late. Will be interesting to see how long they wait.

their seats system has always been brutal it’s extremely easy to have the seats balloon if you’re not careful and if they’re yearly there is only a 30 day window a year where you can cancel them when the banner to do so appears.

Nope. Figma Make first renders an HTML/React app with your design. Then you could convert to a Figma design file if you have a pro plan. Extremely underwhelming.

There's hardly any difference between using Figma and just designing it with Codex and Claude Code. And now, Claude Design seems to get it right.

OK but what we really want to know, what's it like when it comes to drawing pelicans riding on bicycles?

They realized they have no product or ground to stand on. Once such model drops and once chip manufacturers catch up with demand, they are dead, if their only product is inference.

So OpenAI decided to do weird things like buying up all the hardware that exists or will exist in the next 2 years to buy time to build the product. Then launch things like Sora, ChatGPT shopping, ads etc. They seem to be struggling with this.

Anthropic, being late to the game of hoarding up all the hardware, decided to "buy time" by hiding CoT, implementing KYC (especially for Chinese users), to delay the efforts of distillation. The products they build in the interim are SaaS clones designed from the POV of AI agents and tight integrations with their models.

And it seems like Google is just sitting aside, watching things unfold, since their business model doesn't stand on inference.

The most likely scenario is that OpenAI and Anthropic will still crash and burn when such open model is released.

Figma's survival is still questinable though. Most likely scenario is likely that there's going to be an open source alternative that has AI integration at the core level, rather than an afterthought.

Anyone remember Google's social media platform??? Google Plus?

This is a good era to be in! Its the era of product experimentation.

As long as you realize that 90% of the products will not be supported long term if it doesn't contribute to bottom line revenue, then just appreciate it for what it is, a bunch of smart people trying to create useful products.

Just don't be surprised if Anthropic goes the Google route, which is shutting down the majority of the products that are too small / not successful enough to impact their revenue.

Keeping the hype alive through to IPO is critical now.

There's no reason to believe Anthropic will stop caring about this product--they're not Google [1] after all.

> It really feels like Anthropic's product area is extremely overextended at this point.

I don't think so. They have one core product: the Claude model; they're enabling different ways of accessing it. Claude Code for developers, Cowork for general business tasks, and chat for consumers.

This is their first graphic design product, but it fits nicely because once you create a prototype, you can hand it over to Claude Code to make the website, mobile app, or whatever.

The advantage Anthropic has is their ecosystem. A Claude user will be way more productive using Design because all of their context is with Claude; other AI tools don't "know you" the way Claude does. Claude already knows your style and your preferences; it's much more likely to create designs you'd like.

When you go to an AI you don’t normally use, you essentially have to start from scratch.

[1]: https://killedbygoogle.com

Why would we want to move away from hard fought UX design lessons? Dynamic and fluid UX is infuriating.

The alternative is to not hop on the AI bandwagon, or run an "also ran" AI story, and both those scenarios (I expect) game out worse given the current zeitgeist.

Previous comment with the prior 3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47794419

What a toxic workplace :/

What? In my experience people who are good at their job can get it done in a reasonable amount of time. Working 12 hours a day is obsession, no competence. There can be overlap, but there is no causation.

As a dev manually typing I loved tailwind for sure, with LLMs not so much, and bootstrap in particular nails it the best IME. and yeah one can customize bootstrap quickly to look however it should, just tell your frontier LLM of choice your wishes.

> Import from anywhere. Start from a text prompt, upload images and documents (DOCX, PPTX, XLSX), or point Claude at your codebase. You can also use the web capture tool to grab elements directly from your website so prototypes look like the real product.

A little misleading, as I thought they would showcase different types of site design entirely.

The amount of hype is too much for me - its smoke and mirrors. A firm that knew it was on track to change the world (as much as they have been boosting) would not do this. Much like how Apple kept complete silence about the iPhone and then shocked the world.

I explore designs in Claude Desktop, and once I’m satisfied, I’ll let Claude desktop handover prompts for Claude Code. Claude Code makes a review harness inside the actual application for each atom, molecule and organism, and I accept each of them one by one.

I wonder if this is something similar, but makes the whole process smoother. As someone who’s not particularly good at frontend, I’m quite happy with what all this accomplishes.

It is that in one case it is obvious for you that you don’t understand what you are looking at, and in another, for some reason, it is not.

nature beckons its creatures to become whatever they must become to be useful in the greater living ecosystem (the loop)

when you can't be useful in the loop you get flushed out of existence

humans who can't be useful will also thus be buffered out of existence

```

<YOUR APP IDEA HERE>

----

To get your credentials and learn about InstantDB, fetch this URL:

https://instantdb.com/llm-rules/create-app/AGENTS.md

```

Every cURL request to AGENTS.md spins up a new backend and splices in the credentials.

I used it to build this multiplayer pelican game:

https://349b7470-3747-49e7-8ece-960a45b0b2da.claudeuserconte...

Disclaimer: I am the founder of InstantDB

Combine that with the obvious hackernews manipulation that somehow gets each and every haphazard release instantly to the top, and you can see they're starting to feel some real heat.

Another thing: I realized how much I hate waiting for Claude to finish its thing. With UI designs, a quick interaction loop between tool and user feels much more important than with code.

It feels like a lightly designed product that moves claude CLI to their backend, generates the HTMLs and renders them in browser on claude.ai website for you. Sure, it accepts your design system as an input from you or imports from your repo, but you could feed the same into claude CLI as well?

I'm curious what exactly it gives besides having claude CLI + prompting it well with your design system + skills.

Then Claude came for the designers with Claude Design, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a designer.

...

BUt what it really shows is there's no vision. If you had a vision and coherent strategy you'd concentrate resources - not dilute them across a myriad of projects.

So far it's burned through 45% my design quota. On a positive note, I finally have my fonts rendering. I'm still waiting for it to figure out how it mangled the SVG versions of my logo. I've watched it trying a lot of stuff for 20 minutes and now I've got something that's not my logo.

Now its 5 Hour usage, Weekly Usage, Claude Design, Daily Routine Runs, and the Extra Usage portion...

Maybe they realised its actually a dead-end? Why else would you not double-down and concentrate resources? This would be an amateur error if it turned out to be true.

However, there is of course a raw mechanical side to design that comes more into play on practical applications like a software UI vs. pure play memes/vibes like branding or a landing page.

Think hierarchy, leading, kerning, scale, contrast, balance, etc. These things remain constant throughout trend cycles and can absolutely get you half way there. Then aesthetic memes can be sprinkled on top by a human to make people believe "this feels cool."

Like what they have some superior knowledge or ability to design ?

Let me remind you they weren't always tech giants, what if we said lets stop innovating before apple or any of these became a thing.

I don't agree. For novel use cases, yes there's some truth to that. But consistency is huge in a UX. If basic controls work well for a situation, they should be used. Designers should not be getting "creative" or "original" for those sorts of things.

If I have a product out of my lab that makes it to human trials, there will be a full team of marketers and designers tasked to the brand image.

Also, a lot of very good software developers are bad at design and unwilling or unable to pay for a designer. This will be an improvement for them.

But the mass market (who this is ultimately for) doesn't care about great design. They care about "seeing something on the screen." If they can get something that looks 80-90% aligned with what they observe to be modern design, they won't think twice (even if the end result is clunky or not on par with what a professional designer would produce). It's the Ikea Effect on steroids.

Is there also a place in the world for not-great-but-good-enough design?

not really, great design in a web application is no surprises.

Still human?

This is entirely accurate, however I fear there's a lack of perspective:

If you're in the middle of the desert and need to sit down, that random rock looks and feels great because there's nothing even close, around!

One issue that a lot of experts fail to recognize is that "great" is relative: It's not apparent to the experts because they are only pulled in when their expertise is needed. Most of the time when experts are pulled in, requirements are clear, you have traction, scale and now you need to optimize.

Once you're spoiled for choices, you have lots of options and then that random rock doesn't look appealing at all: now you're considering other factors like budget - IKEA vs Adirondack.

What AI is making a huge difference are places where "great" isnt that valuable:

- people in the desert: Someone wants to track what words their toddler is saying or their groceries or how much kitty litter they should buy soon and Claude will spit something out reasonable even if it makes the skin of experts crawl.

- commodity and bean counters: in cut throat industries like power or insurance, it's all commodity services competing on price. Most people arent going to pay a premium for a better looking, more intuitive insurance app. It just needs to not suck and fall over. Or you're making a knockoff of an existing, well understood product

The catch is that the person making the decision might not know or care about the difference.