Claude Design: How to Create On-Brand Visuals With AI

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Welcome to the AI Explored Podcast, helping you put AI to work. And now, here's your host, Michael Stelzner. Hello, hello, hello.

Thank you so much for joining me for the AI Explored Podcast. Brought to you by Social Media Examiner. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner, and this is the podcast for marketers, creators, and business owners who want to know how to put AI to work. Today we're exploring how to create visual designs for everything from slides to animations to websites with Claude Design. My special guest is an AI strategist and consultant who helps creators and entrepreneurs get more from their existing content. He's host of the Creator News Live show, Jeff See, welcome back to the show. How you doing today?

It's great to be back, Mike. Thank you so much for having me. I, I always enjoy, uh, being on your show and, and just hanging out and nerding out with a fellow AI geek, uh, a little bit. It's always fun.

Well, it's super cool. It's awesome. For folks that don't know, Jeff and I go way back. He was host of the social media marketing talk show back in the day.

Yeah.

So it's great always to get you back on this show. We're here to talk about AI and we're here to talk about design. So I'm just curious from your perspective, what are the misconceptions or maybe limiting beliefs that people have about AI and design right now?

I think most of it, when they say AI, they think of generative AI, which is like Midjourney and ChatGPT that can take and build an image out of just a prompt. And, um, Claude Design's really not that. In fact, it doesn't do that at all. It does not generate images. So I think the biggest misconception is that People can just, you know, I just, I'll just use it if I need to make a logo or something. And they don't think of the entire system and the cool stuff you can do beyond that.

Well, and how is design changing as a result of this new technological innovation that we call Quad Design?

I'll give you the, the good news and the bad news. One, the good news is I think that everybody now has this tool, especially if you're a solopreneur, you have this, this new palette that you can do things that you've never been able to do before. And the, the bad thing is, is that It's easier than ever to hit the easy button and just say, hey, make me a slide deck and not do any sort of design system behind it. And it's just spitting it out and you can, you can see it. It's almost like when Canva came out. Remember that, Mike? When—

Oh yeah.

Canva first came out, you could be like scrolling through the feed and there's, oh, there's a, there's a Canva template. Oh, there's another Canva template. Because people would change the text and that would be it, right? It'd be the same thing that everybody else was using. And so, There's going to be a lot of that slop that we call it, you know, because people just want to, hey, I just need, I just want to get this done. I don't want to work with it anymore. I'm just going to send it out. And then there's other people who are like, oh, I can take this and I can build a design system and then I can have it look coherent across my entire brand and do animations and all sorts of cool stuff that all tie in to the look and feel that I have designed and I really want for my, my brand and my business.

When you and I were chatting, you talked about how a design is now being standardized into code and talk about that a little bit and talk about kind of what it opens up or what it unlocks for those of us that maybe are not designers.

I know a lot of your listeners probably use Canva. Then one of the biggest things with Canva is you had a brand kit. So you'd upload your logo and you'd upload your fonts. And then whenever you'd create a design, it would pull those things in. Well, Claude Design takes that to the next level. Instead of just taking like your logo and your stuff, it actually starts thinking on the use case for what it's gonna be used for. It's gonna use things a little bit different when it's building a website versus building a slide deck or a, you know, a PDF document that you're gonna send to a client. taking the time to actually sit down and build that system out, it's a lot more robust. And the cool thing is, is because it's taking this design system and putting it basically to ones and zeros, it's making it code, right? That you're able to take it to different places. So right now, I mean, a lot of us are enthralled with, you know, Claude and Claude Code. You know, the winds blow really fast in the AI landscape. And so that's probably gonna change. But the cool thing is because I've built this design system and it uses like a design.md, which is, a Markdown file, which is basically pretty text. It's not quite HTML, but it's not quite plain text. It's kind of in the middle. I can take that and plug it into a new system, to a new model that comes out, or to a whole nother company of a frontier AI model. And I can use that design. I don't have to start from scratch anymore because I've basically taken my design and turned it into code.

Yeah, and I have a couple thoughts that I'm going to share on this as well. I have been an active user of Claude Design, and I know so many people are not using it. And one of the big advantages are that if you can communicate with anything and kind of tell it what you like and what you don't like, it effectively can create it for you. And I used to own a creative agency way back in the day before I started Social Media Examiner, and I would work with designers and I would have to very carefully communicate with them. All right, the font's too big, or there's not enough white space here, or I don't like your color palettes. You know, if you can communicate in that way, especially if you have any kind of sense for what looks good and what does not look good, then all of a sudden now what you have available with Claude Design is effectively a front-end designer. And a front-end designer's job is basically to design the look and the feel. So if you think about when you go to a website, some websites look beautiful, some look ugly. The ones that look beautiful have a really careful selection of colors, fonts, and images and whitespace that is composed to kind of help people get something across, right? And good design, which is really in this case not graphic design but layout or front-end design, is what is now unlocked with Claude Design. And the applications of it are massive. We're going to kind of dive into that today. And I already hinted at the top that you can do animations. Jeff said you can do slides, you can do entire websites. It's ridiculously powerful. And I think the benefit is if you are listening right now and you felt restricted because you don't know how to do these things and you don't have access to anyone who can do these things, and you might not even have the money to hire someone to do these things, this is where Cloud Design comes in. Do you have anything you want to add to that?

I thought what you said about it's a design layout system. So if you're used to the Adobe kind of thing, it's almost like InDesign, when you lay out a document or when you're building a PDF back in the day or something like that. It, it does all of that stuff. So it does not generate images like it, it can't. Now that may happen in the future, but as of now, it doesn't create an image like ChatGPT does or something that you would build in Canva. But it does make those placeholders where you can go and add those later. Like I'll use that all the time is I'll use Claude to make, you know, actually the prompt that I want to make ChatGPT render for me. And then I'll take that, drop it back into design, and I can have it inside my website. or my client document or whatever I'm building. So keep that in mind. But when people hear that, I'm like, oh, it doesn't do images. Well, it does everything else. Like the hard stuff like that, ChatGPT really, I don't think can as well as Claude Design can. I mean, it just lays out things beautifully. And the thing is, is once again, we're talking about a design system that we're gonna, we're gonna walk through kind of how to build that first. That's the key is having that design system that you can apply to all these different things. I kind of almost like, like when you're, um, when you're having like an erector set or a Lego set when you're a kid. This is like, it takes all the pieces and that's the instructions that you can build all these different things with. And it's so cool that once you have it done, and it's a living document, you can update it, but once it's done, it makes building a landing page and building some of these other tools we're gonna talk about so much easier because your design's done and it just applies it and it knows how to work within that system.

Yeah, and we're gonna get into the design system in just a second, but if anybody's ever watched any of these HGTV shows, Home and Garden, television shows where they bring in a designer and they bring in color swatches and they bring in, you know, just texture and all these kind of things, right, to kind of make a room look like something different. Maybe they'll bring in carpet samples and wood and paint colors and all that kind of stuff. That's effectively what we're talking about here, but for the web. So why don't you explain from your perspective why the heck a design system matters so much And then kind of what you need to build it, because this is completely new to the way people have used AI, right?

Yeah.

Because the old-fashioned way of using AI is you just chat with something and it does it for you. So talk to me a little bit about what the heck is this design system, and let's dig into it with some depth.

So let me kind of like— when people want to get to Claude Design, there's 2 places where they can get to it. On the web, which is you, you know, you go to claude.ai and then There, down at the bottom left, there's a little button that says Design, then I'll pull up another window. Same thing on the desktop version. If you go to the desktop version, it's the same kind of spot where it's kind of at the bottom left. You click on that, it opens up another window. And if you've never used it before, it's going to ask you to create a design system. You can have multiple design systems, and what those are are basically the building blocks to everything you need. It's fonts, colors, swatches, the things you— logos, everything that you can put in that. And in fact, The more that you give it when you're starting out, the better it's going to build the design process. When Claude Design first came out, there was actually a separate, like, usage graph that you, I mean, it was using its own usage and people would time out of it all the time. Now it actually ties into your credits that are just your general credits for Claude. So you don't have to worry about, like, monitoring that anymore. But it takes about 10 minutes or longer once you drag that stuff in. And so it's even websites you like, it's images you have, like you could go to Pinterest and find like, I really like this color swatch and drag that in. And it will take all of that. It will ask you questions, which is the key part of building your design system from scratch. Make sure that— take the time, set up some time aside where you can go and talk to it. And you and I are big fans of talking to our AI. I use Whisperflow. I think you use the same thing. But even when it asks you those questions, there's usually a box in Claude where it says other or something else where you can You can have like a blank space to, to give it some more information. I usually skip the, the one button click kind of things and go in and say like, hey, I liked, I liked what you said about here and here, but I also like this. So I will actually talk it out. And when you talk, you give it so much more context. So even when you're setting up that design system, talking to your AI gives it a lot more context to pull from when it's building your system. So I guess I think I answered your question there, but that's kind of how we've— we first go in and set it up?

Yeah, let's just cover a couple things. This is what makes Claude Design unique, is by its very nature, without you even asking, it's going to ask clarifying questions, which is not the way normal AI systems work. And it's because design is a preference, right? Like, everybody has different preferences as far as what they like in their design. And you're going to notice throughout your experience with Claude Design, sometimes it'll ask you questions that it needs in order to be able to do its job. But I found that the easiest way to get started with Cloud Design System is to take something you've already got. Like, for example, let's say you've got a product like Social Media Marketing World and you've got a logo and maybe you've got a graphic. Like we have a graphic of the beach, you know, and it's got some like, I don't know, windsurfers on it or something like that. You take those graphics, you plop them in there and you give a link to your website. And what's really cool is it will go out there and it will scrape your site and it will understand kind of your written style because Claude Design is not just, and I don't know if you found this to be the case, Jeff, but it's not just designing a template. It's actually filling in all the context for you as well. You wanna talk about that a little bit?

Yeah, so it'll even give text on the certain kind of backgrounds. It'll find icons that it thinks you can use. So you can have an entire icon library that you can use inside of there. When you're doing animations, it'll pull pull stuff and build those and save those based on your design style. You can drag in as much as you want, like screenshots. You can take screenshots and put them in there. I've built design systems for clients based just off their logo and podcast artwork they've sent me, and we've built an entire design system based off of that. So it can really pull everything that it needs. And the questions it asks, one thing that's really, I think we need to say is like inside of like Claude Code or even Claude Cowork, the desktop version, You can still, I mean, you can build things in there. You can have it build you a landing page inside of Code or Cowork. But the thing is, it doesn't ask you the same types of questions that when you set up a design system, it does in Claude Design. It kind of gives you general ideas and it'll build something for you that looks pretty decent. But if you go and start the process to create a design system inside of Claude Design, it asks you design-specific questions that really harness and pull together all the things it's trying to To get to build that brand. So if you're doing it, like, you can actually, you could copy stuff over and move it over if you wanted to. But I really like the questions because they are so different in CLOD Design versus Cowork and Code.

So talk to me about when we were prepping, you said you had this Jetsons story. Talk to me about the Jetsons story.

Yeah. So one of the things when I was putting together my, my design and the thing that's really cool for me is, you know, when you're, when you're building the design system, I like to find out things that I don't know, 'cause so many of, there's so many things that we don't know when we're, when we're trying to figure this stuff out. And AI is so new, it's that way. But I have kind of like a '50s style brand and kind of the '60s, and it's kind of like Fantastic Four, you know, versus, you know, Norman Rockwell kind of a thing. And I'm like, and I wanted the Jetsons to be thrown in there too, 'cause I always liked that style. And I'm like, what is that? And so I workshopped it back and forth and found out it was a style called Googie. It's Googie architecture, not Google, Googie. And so now I dropped that in there and it created my design system, and now it knows that, that architectural style. So you'll even see it in some of my designs in the background of, of things that it's generating for images. It has that Googie architecture because that design system learned what that meant and it applies it inside of the system whenever I'm generating some sort of new product or artwork or whatever it needs to be. Even when I'm having Claude write me prompts for ChatGPT to make an image, it knows that and uses that in the prompt as well.

And then, Give me an example of how you're using this for your podcast episodes.

I harp on this a lot on my show, and you and I talked about it a little bit before. I'm trying to be really aware of— I don't want to use the time that I've saved with AI, like, to just fill it up with more make-work. I want to use the time I've saved with AI to actually create more creative things or things that I've never been able to do before. So one of the things that I have done Is I— it was back in Amy Porterfield, and it might have been on one of your shows. She was talking about how on her podcast she used to have, and she still does, I think, but every episode has like a downloadable, like, and I was like, that is so cool. I wish I could do that for every episode of mine where it's like a thing that, you know, people could get and use and it'd be a good tool for people. But I'd never been able to have the team or the time to do it. Well, because of my show now is it used to take almost a whole day to put together. Now it takes about—

3.

Half an hour to 45 minutes with AI. I'm using that time now that I built this thing where it actually goes and reads my transcript, pulls all this, the relevant info, and makes these cheat sheets that automatically apply the design system for my thing, actually goes to my website, uploads it itself, makes the thumbnail, does everything, and puts it as a draft to get to send out to people. You can see that at jeffsyd.com/cheatsheet. It just, it blew me away and I don't have to do anything. It's done. Like it happens automatically after my show is over.

So what part did Claude Design do in this part?

So Claude Design, every time it creates a cheat sheet, it goes and checks it against my design, uh, my design system and builds it based off of my design system. So everything looks the same week to week, day to day, all the time. And it's, and it's done for me.

So folks that, uh, are learning about design systems, you can create templates inside of a design system. So Jeff probably created a template in his design system that is for the cheat sheet. So just to go over what we've talked about so far, a design system is kind of like a standard operating guide for all things related to how your brand or product should look. We're talking fonts, we're talking about colors, we're talking about spacing, we're talking about subtle little animation elements. Anything you could possibly imagine could all be in this design system. And then in the future, You can use this design system to do all sorts of other things. So let's talk a little bit about once you've actually created the design system, how do you actually use it? Right. Because it's one thing to create it and typically what you get in the beginning isn't what you're going to end up with, right?

Yeah, it's, it's a living, it's a living design. I mean, so you can, you can update it like you're not locked in. Like you can say, hey, you know, I've decided that I didn't really like that for the headline font. So from now on, I want to be, you know, doing it from, from this, right? So that's one of the things you can do. The other thing is it's still what they call in the labs, I think is what it is. So it's not, it's not beta, but it's in the lab and getting it to where you need it to go can be kind of a hassle. And so one of the things that I have done is you can download it as a PDF. You can create your design system and say, hey, just export this design system for me for as a PDF or HTML, or you can send it to Claude Code, which is what I usually do. Now I know a lot of people are like, code, oh my gosh, terminal, oh, it's scary. Well, if you use the desktop app for Cowork, Claude Code is just like a click away and you can still use it inside of their desktop app. And that's how I use it. I just think it's cleaner. You have all the things on the side that you can go back and reference. So don't be intimidated by Claude Code. You can use it for Cowork, But the best way to do that is to, you know, build your design system and then tell it in the chat on the side of Claude Design, say, hey, I need this to be downloaded for design I can use over in Cowork. Can you make me a design.md file? And it'll make it. You can click a download and have that. And then every time you want to make a design inside of a project in Claude Cowork, you can just drag that over there or leave that in that folder and it will reference it moving forward.

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That's great.

So we're back and we kind of have a sense of where we left off. But before we go there, I just wanted to say a couple things, folks. Cloud Design out of the box has a whole bunch of kind of pre-built templates. They've got mobile app design, slides, documents, wireframes, animation, user interface mockups, resumes, 3D objects, research. HTML emails, color and type pairing, diagrams, and something that they call filler, which I don't even know what that means. But these are just some of the templates, like out of the gate that you can do specifically with Claude Design. It's almost anything you can imagine. And Jeff, I think where we left off was you were talking about how you're using Claude Design to do visual stuff, even though we acknowledge it doesn't create visuals, but it can create some sort of a template or a design system that will allow you to create really cool visuals. So kind of just take us there.

Yeah, so like if you're doing a walk, like a wireframe or doing a website mockup that you want to maybe move over to HTML, you can have it design it with placeholder or like, you know, an image goes here and then you can go use Claude to create the prompts that you want. And it even, you say, hey, make it in my design system or whatever. And it even knows what colors to tell ChatGPT to create them if you wanted to have them specifically in, you know, match your, your look and feel of your design. So you can do that and then you can just drag it, you can just take it back over and upload it into, you know, Claude Code or Claude Design, wherever your, your final thing is resting at, and it'll add it into the design layout. One of the things I wanted to kind of go over while you were talking about templates, that's like right in the, the Claude Design thing, you can actually have multiple design systems, which we talked about at the beginning. And then you can apply those design systems to any of those templates you mentioned before, like the 3D objects. And like what I'm really stoked about is the animation. But down, if you scroll down below and it's still beta, so it's still kind of like trying to find everything is sometimes gonna be a little difficult. So you have projects, which is things that you've worked on, like things that you have built. Like I have a logo reveal animation project that I put in there. That's under my projects tab down at the bottom of Cloud Design. Then you have the design systems. Like I said, you can have multiple ones of that. And so you can look at those and you can click into those and edit those if you want, because those are really, really cool. In fact, I create them for my clients because it looks really, really cool when you send just a report or even an email template using their own design. Like, they wiggle— they love that. They're like, how'd you do that? And, you know, you can charge them to do that stuff for them, but it's really, really cool. But also, another tab that's there is called Templates, and you can create your own templates. Like I have some landing page templates that I've made. I've even taken the design and ads, since I'm a big Ecamm fam and I do a lot of stuff with Ecamm for clients and for myself, I can actually have templates for Ecamm scenes that I use during my live show that I can just go and make new scenes really easily 'cause I've already got a template set up for that. So I wanna kind of talk about when you were mentioning templates, where all that kind of lives inside of Cloud Design.

Yeah, and talk to us a little bit about how you are actually using Cloud Design to create your YouTube thumbnails. I think it's kind of important. for people to understand this because you could just use ChatGPT to do your thumbnails, but somehow you're combining these things together. So talk about that a little bit.

Yeah, so once it knows, like in Claude Code or Claude Cowork, what your— you already have a design system that you've created, it kind of references that depending on what project you're in. It kind of uses that default without even me having to ask it. So I have, when I create my thumbnail templates for my show, it already knows my design style and it just does it. So it actually writes the prompts inside of my Claude code project where Creator News Live lives. And I can just, I can just take that and I say, hey, I want a new thumbnail. Here's, and it's part of a sequence that I do for my entire show, but it knows that design system. And that's the genius of taking the time to put a design system together is then it just works in the background whenever you're creating assets and it knows what, what it needs it for. And so it goes and pulls that stuff and makes that thumbnail. with my colors, with my fonts, with everything that I want, even using a prompt like ChatGPT, because it'll even put the hex code of the colors that I want in the prompt. So ChatGPT knows what to generate on that end.

Okay, so just so we're clear, and this is new, something I'm learning from you. So right now, Claude Design is kind of lives in its own little world. It's got its, like you called it, it's part of their labs. It launches up kind of its own website, for lack of better words. So are you downloading the Claude Design System and then importing it into Claude Code or Claude Cowork? Because that's an important distinction we probably should talk about a little bit.

When you're wanting to make something from Claude Design and move it over to even ChatGPT or some other system, you can actually send— there's a bunch of different things you can publish as an artifact, which is kind of like Claude's little website stuff that code can go look at. You can export it as a PDF. You can export it as a project HTML. HTML, which gets all your assets and puts it in HTML. That's what I use a lot of times when I'm sending it to a developer or somebody who needs it to actually build other things. You can send it out as a PowerPoint, but it also has these other— if you click on more formats and apps, you can send it directly to Claude Code. So there's a button. So you have your design system or your template or whatever you're working on, you can send it directly to Claude Code. You can send it to a Adobe if you want to. I'm a big— you can actually send it to Canva. There's a— if you have an integration with Canva, it'll send it right over there. Also send it to Gamma and also Google Slides. More keep coming out, but those are kind of the main ones right now. So it's very, very cool.

Okay, so just so we're clear, basically this design system, you can export it out of Cloud Design because Cloud Design is its own little world that it like has walls around it, for lack of better words. You can export it out almost anywhere, then you can use it in those other places. So do you generally start inside of Claude Design, build the design system, and then go over and build the rest of it elsewhere? Is that generally how you do it?

Yeah, it depends on what it is. I'm a big fan of Gamma and I really like it. And so I've already had my design system built so I can just tie that into Gamma and it uses that to build slides because Claude Cowork and Claude Code tie into Gamma. So it's got—

I can just— Tell everybody what Gamma is because we have not heard that word in a long time. Time on this show.

So Gamma is an AI slide generation template. Like, it makes PowerPoint slides or that kind of stuff, but it does a really good job of it. Like, when I'm doing a talk or something, or even Social Media Marketing World, is I'll have it and I'll take kind of my thoughts, break it down in an outline, have Claude kind of help me with hooks and all that kind of stuff. And then I can send it to Gamma with that actual, you know, transcript or notes that I have, and it will actually build that. And the cool thing, because I have a design system, It builds it exactly with my colors and my fonts and my logos and everything it needs. It builds it for me right there. And so that is a really cool thing. They're constantly gonna come out with new connectors and things like that. But because you have this design system, like we talked about at the beginning, you can even tell it inside after you've built like your first design system and you, maybe you're not using code, maybe you're not a big code person that kind of freaks you out, but you like co-work, right? So you could just say inside of Claude Design, hey, I'm gonna move this over. To Collide Cowork. I'd like you to make me a document that tells everything you need to make a design system that I can use over at Cowork. It's gonna make you like a design.md file that will live wherever you tell it to go, and then you can just drag that folder in. I really like Code because of the reason that I can just click one button and it'll send it over there and I can use it for a project or build out like the cheat sheet thing that I made. I made a— my link in bio thing just broke. The company kind of went out of business I was using. So I just pointed it at that and said, hey, build this. It built me a WordPress plugin, Mike, that used my design system. And it works. It just, it works all the time. It pulls my most recent YouTube videos and my blog posts, and I don't have to do anything with it and keeps everything up to date. And Claude built it for me using Claude Design as the kind of the design system behind it all.

Well, that's super cool. And folks, I have a completely different application, which I'm going to share a little bit about. I use Claude Design within Claude Design, and I stay within Claude Design. Because the predominant application I'm doing with Claude Design is I'm creating web pages. So I'm creating web pages for lead magnets. I'm creating landing pages for our products. The AI Business Society landing page was completely built and managed inside of Claude Design. And this is what I love about this. You know, in the past you'd have to go into like the source code if you wanted to understand HTML or you'd have to use WordPress. Well, in my particular case, I just literally speak out loud And I tell it to make the changes. And this is the magic of Claude Design is that you can quite literally just talk to it. So let's talk about like the use of Claude Design because I feel like the magic of it is it's like a chatbot meets a designer. So let's like get into a little bit of actually how to use Claude Design because the advanced stuff is exporting it out into all the other applications. But how are you actually interacting with Claude Design? And I'll throw my sense in there as we go along.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So WhisperFlow is what I use to talk to every— I love it because I can make a Slack message. I can do it in, you know, Code or Cowork or whatever. It works for any program if you wanna talk to it. Uh, if you grew up, if you're old like me, uh, like Dragon NaturallySpeaking was the thing everybody was using. It was such— so clunky. It was so clunky, Mike. Remember how you had to train it for hours and it still didn't work very well? This just works. Like it's just, it's very Star Trek-like and it took me a long time to, Like get into the thing where I'm talking to my computer instead of using the keyboard. I'm actually editing video now using even some of the stuff from Claude Design without even having to touch my keyboard. I can edit video now. It just blows my mind. It's so incredible. But yeah, speaking to it is the big thing. And then also when you create that, when after you've done your first design system, when you're making like a website or a landing page mockup or something, don't just ask For one, like say, hey, gimme like 5. And then it gives you like 5 examples and say, okay, I like what number 1 or A, I really like option A, but I really liked option, some stuff in option D too. So gimme 3 more smooshing those together and have, and, and, and let me see what those look like. And you can just talk to it in that way. And the cool, this is how the guy who actually built Claude Design uses it. Like he likes to do the, gimme multiple iterations and take these 2 and then smoosh 'em together and then see what you get. That's one of the biggest benefits of using Claude Design because you can see it and has those tweaks on it and you can move things around instead of just like trying to work with it just directly in Claude Code where it makes something and you have to go back, oh, okay, I need you to move this over 10 pixels or whatever. You can do it yourself. You can save credits by doing it that way. But that's how I use it. I talk to it like a designer. I basically am standing over a designer's shoulder and speaking out what I want it to create and Iterating it that way.

Well, and as a former art director, I used to own a creative agency. This is exactly how you would work with a designer, right? Like if they're designing something for you, whether it be a layout or a logo, you would say, okay, I like this element over here. I like this color selection over here. Let me see it in like a bunch of different colors, right?

Right.

Or let me see some more contrast over here. Or let's, let's add a little bit more white space. Where it gets really interesting is the animation side of things. And I would love to talk to you about that. I will explain, I just do basic stuff, like I'll ask it to make it interactive and it will take something that's plain and it will basically allow you to like expand open boxes or it will allow you to like have a copy button on prompts and stuff. But you can do way more sophisticated stuff. Talk to me a little bit about what you can actually do on the animation side of things, because I think that's the superpower of this thing.

Yeah, so a lot of YouTubers are using this too, is because you can actually take your transcript, like we could take this episode after we're done with here, we could take the transcript and throw it to Claude Design and say, listen, there's some great sections in here. I want you to find those sections and actually make motion graphics built on my design system. So it fits your brand and it will actually make like After Effects style, really high-end graphics that used to take me days and hours to put together. It's really, really cool. And once again, I'm gonna give you a little hack and a little hint of something that just came out that I have just been blown away with. And hat tip to Justin over at Primal Video who talked to me about it. But it's—

Justin Brown, right?

Yeah, Justin Brown. It's called ChatCut and it ties— it's not CapCut, we all know that. This is ChatCut and it ties into either OpenAI or Claude Code and it basically lets you edit video With AI. And the cool thing is because I built that design system, I could point it to that design system and it made all my motion graphics inside of, inside of this, the software ChatGPT. And it, and it just works. It has a timeline. It's everything. I cut my teeth making video and this is blowing me away. But once again, because I have a design system, everything is cohesive. Everything ties together. It already, all the— heavy lifting of figuring out that kind of stuff is done and it matches my brand. If you go to the last video, it was with Michael King Jr. that I did with talking about him, uh, his keynote with a saxophone on my YouTube channel, Creator News Live, that I did not even touch a keyboard. It was all spoken into existence and it blows me away. But the cool thing was, is Claude Design made it happen because it's a separate program. It still uses Claude. It ties into, because I had this design system. I didn't have to start from scratch. It just, it just used it.

Well, what's also cool is that Claude Design has built-in animations. A little example, I had like a 5-step process and I just decided to take my design system for the AI Business Society and have it animate the 5-step process. And what it did without creating a video, it just figured out a way to vector draw animations on the screen that kind of created the entire thing, and it, it kind of just rendered it in code. And that's really cool because those animations take up almost no space. You can add them to a website. And also for our software, Notgo, we also created a— one of my employees created a design system that was an expert at software user interfaces. So whenever we actually want to design new functions and features of our app, he can mock it up in there, and then he can show it to me before he actually builds it. Where in the past, he would use Claude Code to build the whole thing, and then it would be wrong, and then I would have to give him feedback. So you can start to think about the applications here. You can do storyboarding, you can do mockups, you can actually develop entire websites. Have you done anything with website work at all?

Yeah, so I use it a lot of times to build web pages, and I've actually, like I mentioned, the cheat sheet, that's all Done.

In HTML?

Yeah, it did it all for me. It just made it and it was done. The other thing I would tell people is like, don't be just limited to the templates. The templates are there just for a guide, but anything you can think of, you can probably make. Or I've had things before, going back to the video thing where it was using my design system, is like, hey, I needed like a really slow push in or a pull back and it wasn't doing it. It was doing like a pop and stuff like that. And it's like, hey, do you want me to build the tool for to make that happen? I'm like, yeah, do it. And it did it. Like, so those kind of things, you're just almost limited by your imagination. So look at those templates to get, you know, ideas and like, yeah, sure, do your websites and do other things, but think outside of the box of what you could use and then apply that design system to it that you've already built so it's on brand for you. And I mean, the world's your oyster because it can figure stuff out. That's what's so cool about it. You're not like butting heads with the designer like, well, we can't do that. You know, that's not the way it is. And you can just say like, no, I want you to do it. And you can fight back with it and it usually gets it done at the end of the day. So it's just really, really powerful.

Uh, folks, before we move on to some of just advanced functionalities, uh, specifically with carousels and Cowork, I just wanted to let y'all know that I have also completed a training. Well, it will be done by the time this releases, specifically on how to use Claude designed to build sales pages or landing pages for freebies. And if you want to, that's available inside of our AI Business Society because that's my background as a former agency where I built websites and stuff. I feel like this is the big unlock, like taking an old ugly website and making it look more attractive and adding new interactive functionalities to it. That's the kind of stuff I've talked about in there. Now, Jeff, you're doing some really cool stuff with carousels. And specifically, it involves more than just Claude Design. So kind of break down, if you don't mind, like your process. First of all, tell us what the heck you're doing and then tell us how you did it.

So one thing we haven't talked about that I think is really, really cool is that inside of Claude Design, you can also run skills. So you're not just limited to whatever you have on there. Like a lot of times when I'm— you mentioned building like landing pages or websites or I have like an anti-AI slop skill that I have found that I really like and use. I can use that on all my text inside of Design, so I don't have to wait until, you know, iterating it down the line.

What does that skill do for you, just out of curiosity?

So it like, it'll make sure it doesn't have any hyphens on it, it'll make sure it doesn't sound AI-ish, it'll do—

No emojis.

Yeah, that kind of stuff. And I usually use it in tandem with a document that I have put together. Once again, it's just a .md file that I can move between AI systems. I have one that's like, that sounds like Jeff, right? Like it's, it's analyzed all my emails from pa— you have something similar, I'm sure, Mike, where you can, it analyzes it and it can talk like you. And so that's what I have as well. So you can run skills inside of those design systems and there's a bunch of cool creators that are making things specifically design as well. So make sure you, you can check those out as well. But for the, the carousel thing that I made is I built it first in, in Claude Cowork. And now it's in code as well. But basically what it does is it takes the hour-long transcript of my show, it goes in and breaks things down into what would be great takeaways for a carousel post. And it actually has, it has a hook at the beginning, it has 2 like builds in the middle, and it has a payoff and a call to action at the end. So it has a formula that it's searching through the document to fill. But then the cool thing is, is it actually writes those, the prompts to make the background images, because remember, Claude Design and can't really make them themselves. So I have it generate that. It's all in one process.

Wait real quick, just so we're clear.

Yeah.

Did you start with Claude Design to come up with the look and feel of each of the carousel slides? Was that like where you started with this? Like, here's, you know, like we're going to have 7 and let's come up with some examples of how it might look generically as a template. How did Claude Design play into this?

So what I did is I wanted it to have the alternate dark and light backgrounds.

Okay.

But the cool thing was it already had my design system, right? So it used that as the base. And so—

Okay, so you took the design system into someplace else. Okay, where did you take it?

So it went into Claude Cowork, and it, I mean, to Claude Code, and it uses that every time. So it now has a skill. So every time after I'm done with my show, I basically give it the transcript and say, run the carousel, the Creator News Live carousel skill, and it builds the prompts for me that I take over to ChatGPT. I take those ChatGPT images. that it creates based off of those design styles that I have already. And then I just take those images, put 'em in a folder, and then I hit continue and it builds the carousel post that works for LinkedIn and also Instagram. And in fact, I pinned one for the top for you guys to look at if you wanna see what those look like.

And what is your Instagram account?

@JeffC, and that's, that's where you can find it. It's also, it's all, we also post 'em on my LinkedIn as well, so they're in both spots.

Okay, a couple quick questions. So have you automated the entire thing or are you manually copying and pasting prompts? Like, how are you getting the stuff from Claude over to ChatGPT?

So the only manual stuff I do is actually rendering those images because it makes the prompt. I copy those over, but once I put those in a folder, it's automatic. I'm working on now is using another tool like Magnific or Higgsfield.

Yeah, I was thinking about Magnific or Higgsfield. You could probably fully automate it.

I mean, I'm already paying for for it. I don't want to— it's kind of that, you know, oh, do I want to take the time and, you know, whatever. So that's the next step. You could easily do that and have it generate it for you and stick it in and be done. I just like to finesse a little bit more. I still think there's a little—

Are you art directing ChatGPT a little bit then when you get those images, or are you just accepting them as—

I've done it enough now that it knows, like, I don't have to do it. So I do this from— for mine. And also, if you go look at Guy Kawasaki's Instagram, He's using this skill as well because we produce his show. And so it's really great because it uses his design style instead of mine. So you can actually see the difference between the two because you can have— it's not— it doesn't look anything like mine because it's using his design system, but it's using the same skill, if that makes sense.

Now, when you go over to ChatGPT, are you loading your design system or is Claude just giving it a very— it's giving a description based on your design system?

Yeah, it's making the prompt based on that. And the cool thing is Is actually when I first started putting this together, I was still, I still use Midjourney a lot, but I really like ChatGPT with how it, it's just a better image generator right now. Yeah.

It's ridiculously good for images. Yeah.

But the skill actually produces 2 different prompts, one for Midjourney and one for ChatGPT.

Ah.

So I can pick between which one I want. And so that's part of the process as well. And eventually, you know, depending on whatever image generation is winning at the time, I'll switch, I'll swap that out and update that skill. But it gives me options. That's the thing is I want it all done and I, I don't have to do anything except for copy and paste that prompt and then point it to that folder when I make those images and I'm done and it builds everything else. It even knows like to build the, the slide so it doesn't mess with the text. So it has some elements in the background, but it makes it in a way so the text is clear. And so that was something that I had to work through at the beginning and now it actually, I built this Python script that actually looks at the images and actually figures out the best way to put them and all that stuff. And so it does a really good job. So basically it's hands-off.

Okay, so just so I'm clear, once you download those images out of ChatGPT, you're placing them in a folder and you're having either Claude Code or Claude Cowork watch for that, those images to be dropped in that folder. Is that right?

Yep.

How does it actually get to Instagram though?

Well, it actually puts it into Slack for my team to do because I don't post it. That lets my team do it. The cool thing at the end of the generation, it gives me all the images to upload for Instagram. It writes all the prompts for the different images on Instagram.

The captions or whatever you mean?

Yeah, for each one as you scroll through. And LinkedIn, it actually makes it a PDF because PDFs are what it uses that use different images. So Instagram has the PDF so you can swipe through and it has a specific prompt for LinkedIn based off of the actual transcript. It like it does everything. Like it's just done. It's basically the team posts it and we're, and we're done.

Jeff, first of all, thank you for sharing your insights on cloud design. I've learned quite a bit from today's discussion. If people want to connect with you on the socials, I know you've already mentioned Instagram, but is there a preferred social platform? And then also, if they want to check out everything else you've got going on, where do you want to send them?

So I'm @JeffSIEH everywhere. That's @Jeff and my last name is spelled S as in Sam, I-E-H. That's I before E, especially in C. That's how my mommy told me to say it. And then I talk about all this stuff in my newsletter that goes out every week. So jeffc.com/news, that's how you can sign up for that. And also if you wanna check out the cheat sheet, it's jeffc.com/cheatsheet. It just makes me happy every week when I don't have to do anything and I look and it's right there ready to go.

Jeff, thank you so much for sharing your insights with us today.

Thanks, Mike. I appreciate you having me back on.

Hey, if you missed anything, we took all the notes for you over at socialmediaguy.com.

examiner.com/a126.

Be sure to follow this show on your favorite podcasting app. And if you've been a listener for a little while, we would love a review and do let your friends know about this show. Also check out my other show, the Social Media Marketing Podcast. This brings us to the end of the AI Explored Podcast. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner. I'll be back with you next week. I hope you make the best out of your day and may AI help you become more successful.

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