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Figma's woes compound with Claude Design

martinalderson.com

21–30 of 106 posts

Re: Figma's woes compound with Claude Design

#21
post #6

Used Claude Design to build the landing page for my side project (strimoza.com) over the weekend. Honestly impressive for a solo dev with no design background — got something shippable in a few hours. That said, I still ended up going back to tweak things manually. It's great for 80%, the last 20% still needs judgment. Not sure it kills Figma for teams, but for indie devs it's a game changer.

Please change your hero font. The extra wide style hurts reading

Re: Figma's woes compound with Claude Design

#22

> Anthropic themselves launched Claude Design which is a pretty direct competitor to Figma in many ways. While it's nowhere near functional and polished enough to replace Figma's core design product, I expect it will get significant traction outside of that The reaction that designers I know have given Claude Design couldn’t be different than how Claude Code was received by software devs. It’s simply useless for desi…

I tried uploading our design system. Claude Design’s environment was so limited it had to reimplement it from scratch in HTML, JS and CSS. Doing that burned through more than half the token limit. Along the way it completely changed it and made up things that don’t fit in at all, neither visually or as code. The output of making a mockup is one huge HTML file with minified CSS that just can’t be used meaningfully for anything.

I guess I had expected something like Claude Code with visual tools added on top, but that’s not what this is.

Re: Figma's woes compound with Claude Design

#23
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you export the .fig file (even programatically) and you ingest in Claude Design you won't need to create users in Figma, right?

Sure, if your design decisions are completely one-sided and transactional. In my experience, though, being able to comment and collaborate in Figma is important, as is being able to go find specific icons and components on my own.

i believe it depends on the design system maturity too.

Re: Figma's woes compound with Claude Design

#24
post #6

Used Claude Design to build the landing page for my side project (strimoza.com) over the weekend. Honestly impressive for a solo dev with no design background — got something shippable in a few hours. That said, I still ended up going back to tweak things manually. It's great for 80%, the last 20% still needs judgment. Not sure it kills Figma for teams, but for indie devs it's a game changer.

The other commenter went a bit hard on their critique.. to each their own, I think your design is mostly fine except for that super squished title font (that is also sadly used on buttons)..

It makes it very hard to read, and if you're counting on people scanning the page to quickly understand your offering, and then stick around, you should consider fixing that.

Choose a better proportioned font to improve readability and it will make your site instantly better and easier to understand.

I honestly thought the rendering was broken when I first loaded the page (I'm on an ultra-wide monitor) but then realized it was just like that.

Re: Figma's woes compound with Claude Design

#25
post #6

Used Claude Design to build the landing page for my side project (strimoza.com) over the weekend. Honestly impressive for a solo dev with no design background — got something shippable in a few hours. That said, I still ended up going back to tweak things manually. It's great for 80%, the last 20% still needs judgment. Not sure it kills Figma for teams, but for indie devs it's a game changer.

It’s pretty hard to read on a phone, and the prose, particularly in the bullet points, has that annoying LLM-y trait of focusing way too much on implementation details ("Bunny CDN"!) rather than telling me a single reason why I'd actually want to pay for your product.

Re: Figma's woes compound with Claude Design

#27

> Anthropic themselves launched Claude Design which is a pretty direct competitor to Figma in many ways. While it's nowhere near functional and polished enough to replace Figma's core design product, I expect it will get significant traction outside of that The reaction that designers I know have given Claude Design couldn’t be different than how Claude Code was received by software devs. It’s simply useless for desi…

There are many designers. I know a bunch who basically stopped using Figma altogether and just prototype what they're working on directly in code these days. For them, Claude Design was a very interesting addition.

Re: Figma's woes compound with Claude Design

#30

> Anthropic themselves launched Claude Design which is a pretty direct competitor to Figma in many ways. While it's nowhere near functional and polished enough to replace Figma's core design product, I expect it will get significant traction outside of that The reaction that designers I know have given Claude Design couldn’t be different than how Claude Code was received by software devs. It’s simply useless for desi…

As someone who does both development and design, I agree. With some caveats.

At this point, Claude now writes > 99% of my code. I wasn't an enthusiastic early adopter; it took me a while to be willing to let go of the reins. But in tandem with LLMs getting better, I also began to realize that what happens inside the code is very rarely important enough for me to care about. Like, I care that it's secure, and performant where it needs to be, etc. -- but mostly I just care about its outputs. If it does what I want it to do, then how it does this doesn't really matter to me or my clients or my users. On the development side, my attention has focused to writing specifications and monitoring the correctness of the test suite, and > 99% of the time that's good enough. It's been a lesson in non-attachment to let go of lovingly crafting every single line of code, but the tradeoff in terms of productivity has absolutely been worth it.

What makes this viable is the fact that there's essentially a "hidden layer" (the code) upon which Claude can operate. My clients don't actually care about the code, and within certain bounds (correctness, security, performance, extensibility, etc.) it turns out that neither do I. This gives Claude a lot of latitude to solve things in its own way, and I think that's a bit part of its effectiveness.

On the other hand, with design there is no hidden layer. Every single aspect of the design is visible to the user and the customer. So the design reflects upon my work in ways that code does not. This means that the conditions which allow me to relax my grip on coding just don't exist for design. It's very difficult for me to imagine delegating design in the same way that I've become comfortable delegating coding.

That said: I suspect that the use-case for Claude Design will be for applications which today receive very little design attention. There are loads of applications where design is less than an afterthought, and the product suffers terribly for it. Delegating to Claude, in those contexts, would likely be a very big win. But for applications which already have designers obsessing over every pixel, I see a very limited role for this. Figma's market is mostly the latter -- the former, by definition, is not part of the market for design tools -- so I don't see them being threatened by this for a long time.

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