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Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design

samhenri.gold

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Re: Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design

#131

Post by preommr »

I've worked on design tools for the last few years.

This article is a fundamental misunderstanding of both the design space, and figma as a company.

Just a few of my thoughts:

- Figma was always about building a successful company over a successful product. Figma started with a much more ambitious aspiration, and had the ability to deliver through talent like Evan Wallace. A lot of it started with showing how capable webgl was in the browser. And yet, a lot of things like 3d features don't exist because they had the awareness to really hone in and focus on building a specific thing that made them money because everybody in the company ended up with an expensive seat price.

- Seriously, Figma is a company that's about design tool second, and about getting a product that businesses use first. To that end, it's already succeeded through the IPO, subsequently, who knows what the market is going to look like. Figma having a war chest is in many ways much better than having a technically impressive demo that might evaporate.

- People at Figma, 100%, know everything in this article. And not just figma people, like anybody and everybody that's tried to build a design tool has had these thoughts. It's very obvious that ui/ux is the interesection of design/dev/pm. It's also very obvious that it should stick close to the source of truth, to something like code. - The problem is, that it's almost underselling it to say that it's MASSIVE challenge to execute on these ideas because of how easily it bleeds into building not just a design tool, but a coding, data management, architecture, etc. tool

- I could talk at length about all the challenges and potential solutions, but that's neither here nor there.

- On AI, I guess other people's guess is as good as mine, but my gut feeling is that while data is important, SOTA AI is generalist enough that the base models, the thinking they're able to do, is better than having a lot of custom data. Especially because ui design is front-facing - you can just scour the web in contrast to private financial documents, or legal documents for example.

Re: Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design

#132

Post by hbosch »

mickdarling wrote: post #51

I used it today to take a look at my previously built design system with Logos, branding, fonts, and everything else. After a lot of annoying tweaking back and forth, finally, I got something that was satisfactory. Then I looked at the usage and it said I had used 95% of my Claude design usage for the week! This isn't a real tool. This is a plaything, if that's what they're providing as examples.

I used Claude Design to see how it'd spit out a design I already had been working on for some weeks, given a dense enough prompt and a decent requirements document (I did not feed it visuals). I thought the output was pretty good! It didn't match the style we're after at all but it did do some logical content grouping and made some IA decisions I decided to pull into my own explorations. Overall I left with a good impression.

And then I was scrolling Twitter, and saw someone else post their own "success story" and the design was nearly identical to the mock up Claude Design made for me. Lol. The homogenization problem will continue to plague tools like these to some degree, much in the same way AI generated text or code or imagery has a sort of homogenous tone or feel to it.

Re: Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design

#133

Post by hellojason »

jcims wrote: post #117
mickdarling wrote: post #51

I used it today to take a look at my previously built design system with Logos, branding, fonts, and everything else. After a lot of annoying tweaking back and forth, finally, I got something that was satisfactory. Then I looked at the usage and it said I had used 95% of my Claude design usage for the week! This isn't a real tool. This is a plaything, if that's what they're providing as examples.

> I used it today to take a look at my previously built design system with Logos, branding, fonts, and everything else. The fact that you are using this language tells me you are probably more advanced than the average individual, and likely have higher expectations. My sister-in-law has a small apparel company. She’s developed quite a bit of skill over the past six years but she really struggled at the start. She ha…

Funny. My read on that language was this person has absolutely no idea what a truly robust and scalable design system and component library actually are, particularly within the scope of a successful business. Well built ones serve every facet of the organization, not just the product.

Re: Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design

#134

Post by alwillis »

deadbabe wrote: post #125
alwillis wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things to keep in mind: • Claude Design uses Opus 4.7, which is more expensive than earlier models. • It's just Day 2; it's not a finished product. It's ridiculous how quickly Anthropic iterates. • If you've been using Claude for a while, Design already knows your style and preferences. You'd have to start from scratch using a different AI design tool. I don’t doubt that'll pay dividends in the long run.

It will never be cheaper than what it is today. Anthropic is heavily subsidizing.

> It will never be cheaper than what it is today. Anthropic is heavily subsidizing.

We don't know that for sure—they've dropped prices before:

1. Claude 3 → Claude 3.5/3.7 generation (mid-2024 to early 2025): Haiku went from $0.25/$1.25 to $0.80/$4.00 per MTok — this was actually a price increase for Haiku, but Sonnet stayed flat at $3/$15 while delivering significantly better performance, effectively a price-per-capability reduction.

2. Claude 3/4 Opus → Claude Opus 4.5/4.6 (late 2025): This was the big one. Opus dropped from $15/$75 per MTok down to $5/$25 per MTok — a 67% reduction on input and output. This is the most significant explicit price cut Anthropic has made, delivering a far more capable model at one-third the price.

Re: Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design

#135

Post by fleeting900 »

kevinsync wrote: post #32
alkonaut wrote: post #17

So let me get this straight (Pretend I'm 50, a developer since childhood, but I can't CSS to save my life) are there shops where developers, even front end developers, have to talk to designers who are't just sketching an idea for a logo or landing page, but designers who run this Figma thing and maintain the entire products "design" in some "style database"? And the idea is that these designers - who aren't develope…

lol yes. At least in agency world, a common approach in the last X years has been that designers create entire pixel-perfect, component-based sources-of-truth in Figma (which evolve! they aren't delivered static and complete) -- these are also what the client sees and approves, or at the very least they see branded deck slides that incorporate the Figma designs. Anyways, front end then re-implements from Figma into C…

We only have the Figma and Storybook layers (product not agency) but these two comments paint an accurate picture of the absurdity. Thank you!

Re: Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design

#136

Post by alwillis »

uxcolumbo wrote: post #122
alwillis wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I miss the days of having a native desktop design app with a perpetual license. You can go that route with Affinity Designer [1], owned by Canva, who partnered with Anthropic on Claude Design [2]: We’ve loved collaborating with Anthropic over the past couple of years and share a deep focus on making complex things simple. At Canva, our mission has always been to empower the world to design, and that means bringing…

I have it, jumped on the affinity band wagon years ago after Adobe started their enshittification process. After Canva bought Affinity, you now have to authenticate with your email from time to time when you launch the desktop app. Annoying and why do they do that? Might go back to Affinity 2.

> Might go back to Affinity 2.

Sure, but they stopped updating Affinity 2; at some point, it's going to stop working unless you never upgrade your operating system.

Re: Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design

#137

Post by goosejuice »

satvikpendem wrote: post #123

How does this compare to Google's Stitch? As opposed to Anthropic's, it's free largely due to the largesse of Google. https://stitch.withgoogle.com/

Wow, that produced pretty bad results (app). Claude design is much more useful than this but I've only spent around 20 minutes with each.

Re: Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design

#138

Post by dyauspitr »

juliusceasar wrote: post #64
markbao wrote: post #28

I don’t really buy that Claude Design will remove all the complexity around design. Vibe-coded apps using Claude look simpler because they are simpler. They’re not a gigantic product suite with extremely specific UI components tailored to each use case. The ‘simplicity’ is an illusion coming from conflating the complexity of a bicycle (a vibe coded app) with an airplane (an app like Figma). Building the same design s…

Most of the times people just want a bike or a car. Not everybody needs an airplane. This is going to hit Figma very hard.

Stitch has been around for a few months from hole and it does a better job than this. I bet designers are in the honeymoon phase of people don’t know this exists and this does my whole job phase.

Re: Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design

#139

Post by freeone3000 »

kevinsync wrote: post #32
alkonaut wrote: post #17

So let me get this straight (Pretend I'm 50, a developer since childhood, but I can't CSS to save my life) are there shops where developers, even front end developers, have to talk to designers who are't just sketching an idea for a logo or landing page, but designers who run this Figma thing and maintain the entire products "design" in some "style database"? And the idea is that these designers - who aren't develope…

lol yes. At least in agency world, a common approach in the last X years has been that designers create entire pixel-perfect, component-based sources-of-truth in Figma (which evolve! they aren't delivered static and complete) -- these are also what the client sees and approves, or at the very least they see branded deck slides that incorporate the Figma designs. Anyways, front end then re-implements from Figma into C…

Why don’t we just teach the designers code / the coders design? This feels very Programmer-Analyst split

Re: Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design

#140

Post by qingcharles »

satvikpendem wrote: post #123

How does this compare to Google's Stitch? As opposed to Anthropic's, it's free largely due to the largesse of Google. https://stitch.withgoogle.com/

Stitch has way more usage allowance, and it has been absolutely fantastic for some things, but it can get trapped in weird places where whatever you tell it to do it thinks it did it, but it didn't. It's like that Family Guy blinds meme:

https://tenor.com/search/family-guy-blinds-gifs

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