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Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design

samhenri.gold

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Re: Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design

#61

Post by peteforde »

gregsadetsky wrote: post #52
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…

@kevinsync's answer is 100% correct and it's been this way for the last ~~~20? years? at least - only it was "Photoshop files hold the (design) truth" before - now it's figma. But yes, the "design to code" gap has always been where designers' intentions were butchered and/or where frontend developers would discover/have to deal with designs that didn't take into account that some strings need more space, or what to d…

It's a real shame that people bought into this false dichotomy, because the base reality is that people who work in web dev that stubbornly pick either code or layout are more of a liability than an asset.

I don't believe that people who can design and code are as rare as folks seem to believe, either. What seems more likely is that there are a LOT of coders who are extremely fluent in CSS but aren't particularly gifted when it comes to making things look good.

It wasn't that long ago that designers understood that they couldn't just hand off a 2D comp of what they want to see. The job isn't done until the output can be integrated into the app. Nobody gets to launch cows over the wall and go for lunch.

Re: Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design

#62

Post by xeromal »

markdown wrote: post #59
gregsadetsky wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

@kevinsync's answer is 100% correct and it's been this way for the last ~~~20? years? at least - only it was "Photoshop files hold the (design) truth" before - now it's figma. But yes, the "design to code" gap has always been where designers' intentions were butchered and/or where frontend developers would discover/have to deal with designs that didn't take into account that some strings need more space, or what to d…

> only it was "Photoshop files hold the (design) truth" before You mean Fireworks. Photoshop was for graphic design. Web designers used Adobe Fireworks. Figma is a successor to Fireworks, not Photoshop.

I think his point was made regardless of his mistake

Re: Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design

#63

Post by jmye »

esafak wrote: post #33
nslsm wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very easy to know when code is wrong: it doesn't work the way it's expected to. So you explain to the AI what's wrong and the AI fixes it.

Your designers are going to be looking at the layout; they're not going to notice if it's slow, uses too much memory, is not maintainable, doesn't follow repo patterns, etc. Do you think it is reasonable to expect a person with an arts degree to know this?

> Do you think it is reasonable to expect a person with an arts degree

Of course it is.

The only people who think your fucking college degree determines your knowledge level and ability are teenagers and people who are so deeply untalented that it’s the only way they feel qualified.

Re: Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design

#64

Post by juliusceasar »

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.

Re: Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design

#65

Post by gregsadetsky »

markdown wrote: post #59
gregsadetsky wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

@kevinsync's answer is 100% correct and it's been this way for the last ~~~20? years? at least - only it was "Photoshop files hold the (design) truth" before - now it's figma. But yes, the "design to code" gap has always been where designers' intentions were butchered and/or where frontend developers would discover/have to deal with designs that didn't take into account that some strings need more space, or what to d…

> only it was "Photoshop files hold the (design) truth" before You mean Fireworks. Photoshop was for graphic design. Web designers used Adobe Fireworks. Figma is a successor to Fireworks, not Photoshop.

Sure, and also Illustrator sometimes, and Photoshop at other times. Some of the designers I know (very famous for their ui/web work) never touched vector components and just had a ton of layers in Photoshop and air/paintbrushed everything. Hence the meme...

Re: Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design

#66

Post by slopinthebag »

I feel like we're leaning way too much into the "vibe" aspect of using LLMs at the moment. There is definitely a good use case for LLM's here, but is just prompting your way into a design really the best method here? I feel like something in between Figma and Claude Design would give designers the control they want, but still removing the friction of going between design files and the code impl.

Re: Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design

#67

Post by malfist »

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.

The people that want just a bicycle wasn't going to buy figma

Re: Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design

#68

Post by allan_s »

As someone who spent quite some times these days to reverse the figma protocol[0] I can't agree more with

> Figma accidentally excluded themselves from the training data that would have made them relevant in the agentic era.

Their binary format is so much of a "let's reinvent everything" which I think come from the fact it's a tool you can use for web design, android app design, ios design and anything-you-want design that it became a jack of all trade and so mapping it to web is not a perfect 1:1 translation.

And for being useful to agent, any people who got to implement the figma from a UX guy know that even human can't know truly the intent of most figma design, so how a LLM could ? Common source of question that even the UX guy has no answer for:

  1. Ok this button looks great, but in German how will it look ? 
  2. Oh and actually this button does not look great when i put in CSS, it wraps on two line, you cheated again with the letter spacing, did you ?
  3. How does it look on a phone that is not an iphone ? 
  4. You know that doing a border with a gradien is not possible in CSS, so what should i put ?
  5. How does it look on a 4k screen ?
  6. etc.
I know that most of these question can be answered by props and autolayout, and I've been asking the 5 question above these days on a figma that had these but it's just that the UX guy is not that mythical beast that "know-how-to-use-figma-right"

So I can't wait for these tools that are html behind to catch up, even more if we can have the prompt with it. (As a developer I never got to see the prompt the product manager made to the UX guy)

[0]https://github.com/allan-simon/figma-kiwi-protocol

Re: Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design

#69

Post by troupo »

bombcar wrote: post #56
troupo wrote: post #47

Oh no. Figma has variables and instances and it's hard to debug bad colors. And here I am with Claude Code... That so far generated a 2000-line CSS file for a 7000-line app consisting of literally three web pages [1]. Where almost every single color, component, class and style is duplicated at least two times. Where custom classes are fighting with Tailwind classes (yes, there's also Tailwind ON TOP of custom CSS) th…

We can blame AI for slopcoding but it's just what we've been doing for decades now - who cares if it takes 9000 lines to do what in theory Linus and Knuth and Carmack could do in 3000? Our CPUs eat a million lines of code for breakfast and demand more.

Strange then that so many apps are barely usable on these powerful CPUs. Perhaps, CPUs can no longer demand more

Re: Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design

#70

Post by pypt »

willio58 wrote: post #45

I tried yesterday for about an hour to have Claude design make me a simple logo (just the symbol) and didn’t get anywhere good. I’m sure for certain things like UI it’s great, and so is just Claude code, but this Claude Design thing very much to me feels like a demo and not a product. Maybe one day!

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 it output an exact plan of what and where will it draw, lastly ask the chatbot to do the actual drawing using sub-agents for drawing individual components. Also add a "render it to a raster and make sure it looks right" step as well.
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