no real dog in the fight, and I don't even know if the OP's analysis is correct, but "they had a proprietary file format and got left behind because of it" always gives me a nice bit of schadenfreude.
Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design
201–210 of 253 posts
Re: Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
Homogenous might be awesome. I miss predictable UIs.
Good design is distinctive. No one wants a world where everything looks the same.
Good design follows the function. Not distinctiveness per se.
If it's an interface and not an art object, then the design is secondary to the function of said interface.
Good hammer is a good hammer, not a "distinctive" hammer.
Re: Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design
#203I 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…
Isn’t Figma actually the tool used to plan and design the “airplane” level app? (Which of course does not mean it can not be airplane level itself…)
Re: Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good design is distinctive. No one wants a world where everything looks the same.
I think its good that HN and reddit are basically the same, or that all old forums were basically the same but with different color schemes. Homogeneity is a blessing for UX.
Honestly, HN and Reddit are almost as different as threaded discussion forums are possible to be, especially New Reddit with it's "click hundreds of times to unhide most of the text on this page" approach to threading. Reddit's overall design aesthetic is all about pictures and headings and sidebars, and even minor details like the up/down arrows look different and are placed in a different relative position. The only design element they've got in common is Verdana, and that simply because when the websites were launched you only had two widely-installed sans-serif fonts to choose from...
Re: Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design
#205I 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 im…
It’s really difficult to make a design that is usable, follows platform standards, yet has unique personality.
I mean, really difficult.
Coming up with a design that relies exclusively on platform standards is easy, “low-hanging fruit.”
I write stuff for iOS/MacOS/WatchOS. There’s tremendous pressure to follow platform standards. In fact, if you use SwiftUI, it’s very hard to deviate from them. SwiftUI makes it easy (crazy easy) to follow the herd, and downright miserable, if you want to blaze your own trail.
90% of the time, that’s actually a good thing. I get pretty sick of designers that refuse to compromise, and believe that their graphic opus is more important than usable UI. It’s even worse, if the designer is an engineer, with little background in graphic design.
A designer that knows how to compromise, and work with usability, is a unicorn. If you have one, keep them.
Like the code that LLMs produce, I expect the designs to be fairly low-effort, but that will be a good thing, overall. They will be effective and usable. We need more of that.
Re: Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Are those people using Figma?
Feels like a lot of them are using Bootstrap, curated Tailwind elements or Wordpress templates. In which case the challenge Anthropic faces is convincing them the extra flexibility and magical "type into prompt" approach to customization of Claude Design is worth the compute cost...
Figma is answering a different question which is "are you prepared to spend time and money on full time designers to have pixel perfect layouts agreed with managers and consistent across platforms" and non-AI tooling has been orders of magnitude faster and cheaper at generating something that looks good enough as end results rather than mockups since before it existed.
Re: Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design
#207> Figma invented its own primitives to make that work: components, styles, variables, props, and so on
Fireworks, Sketch, XD, Axure, etc all had these (or most of them) in some form before Figma even existed. Even illustrator, photoshop, etc have had the applicable ones for decades.
Re: Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
Claude Design is just a big opinionated prompt: https://www.lobsterpack.com/blog/claude-design-trenchcoat/ . Among other things, it knows it isn't that great at drawing SVGs, so it won't try unless you force it to. For a logo, try drawing it with vanilla Claude Code as if it was a separate project: ask a "design agency" to ask you questions, answer them, then make a detailed brief of what you want to draw, then make…
[flagged]
> Also, you certainly got some brass, linking an entirely AI generated article in a forum where extreme distaste is registered for entirely AI generated posts.
> How is your comment not downvoted to oblivion?
I'm sure there's a polite way to say things.
I heavily dislike LLM content, but if you read the content, it's actually got information of value.
Re: Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design
#209I 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.
It's early.
Anthropic has managed to figure out a lot of reading in between the lines.
I'm not sure how this will be any different.
Re: Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design
#210I 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…
> Vibe-coded apps using Claude look simpler because they are simpler.
This one seems pretty decent?
* https://github.com/2GT-Media-Group-LLC/mikrotik-manager
It was recently Vibe coded by an IT savvy non-dev (or non-traditional-dev anyway ;> ):
* https://www.youtube.com/live/qhZ5q6tlwq0?si=tAtmb04_WwhyaGkn...
Note - If you want to try it out DO NOT deploy it on a hostile network. ie the public facing internet