Exploring Claude Design - Use Cases & First Impressions

Hello! Claude just released Claude Design, and while I'm still in the early stages of exploring it, I thought I'd share my exploration process with you and what I've learned so far. So to get started, I do what I always do, which is I asked the AI, in this case Claude, to help me brainstorm things I should try in Claude Design. So I literally prompted regular Claude Chat Hey, Claude Design came out 2 days ago and I'm curious to use it. Give me 10 ideas for things that I should use it for that are not work related and 10 ideas for things that I could use it for in my work. And it came back with a decent list. I had to do a little bit more brainstorming. Um, to be honest, the first few things I've explored were not that exciting to me. I'll show them to you in a second, but now I feel like I'm getting into some cool stuff that I'm excited to share. So let me just show you. Okay, so here was my first list of 10 ideas that Claude came back to me with, and I decided for the sake of exploration to go with this one: a fictional magazine about your life. Uh, Montlake is the name of our neighborhood, so it named it the Montlake Monthly, and it gave sort of this, uh, very simple brief. And offered to write me a full brief for whichever one I liked. So I said, okay, number 10. So it wrote me a full brief that I did not read because I'm going fast here. So I just copied this and then I opened up, um, Claude Design, which is claude.ai/design, and I just pasted that brief into the chat window here and let it do its thing. So this was the first— I think this was the first thing that I tested here. And so I really didn't spend a lot of time on this. And I think it came up with something pretty cool. I'm not going to— let me go full screen here. I'm not going to take this further for a few reasons, but it came up with— I told you to change the name to the Mueller Monthly. I don't know why there's an ampersand there. And because I do a lot of talking to Claude about house projects, it has focused the theme of this monthly edition on, um, our renovation. And I actually thought it had some pretty funny, um, things down here, like inside the renovation that broke us, the banquette question, which is something that I annoyingly obsess over. Um, and basically it's created this zine, um, for our family. And so it did like this whole table of contents. That is literally pulling from conversations that I have had with Claude, as well as some stuff that it's made up that is kind of placeholder stuff that we could go in and fill in. I gave it a picture of our house and it designed— I haven't even read this, to be honest, yet. Most of this is kind of made-up stuff about generic remodels, which is one of the reasons that I'm not going to go forward with this. It's done a little thing on Banquets. I gave it an image of our dog. This is all made-up content. It doesn't know enough about my dog to have this be personalized yet, but I thought this was kind of cute. This needs obviously some design work, but I thought it was funny that it put in this like wanted for hire, for sale, for the love of God. Like, I'm kind of enjoying its humor a bit here. And this is like the wanted page in our zine. And then I thought this was cute. This is an ad that it put into the zine for drywall, which like, again, drywall hasn't been a huge topic of conversation in our remodel so far, but I appreciated the humor here and the creativity. This has been a huge topic of mine. I bought a new printer. That I am happily obsessed with and talk to Claude a lot about. So it, it well captured that I have been obsessing over this and it should be a feature of this monthly review. And that's the last page. So right off the bat, I was like, okay, this is interesting. Like to get this asset to a place where it is personalized enough that it's truly cool for us, I think would take a lot of work because Claude doesn't have enough context on my personal life. But to get to this like stylized designed zine in a matter of minutes that surprised me with its humor, I was pretty impressed by. And one of the takeaways I have so far with Claude Design is that it's really great at these multi-asset projects where there's like multiple pages and using a consistent design throughout. Okay, so let me show you a few other, um, explorations so far. So I'm always interested in— because I bought a new printer, uh, that can print high-quality stuff like art prints, I'm always interested in what can I use AI for to create things I can print and decorate my house with in like a cool styled way. So, um, this was another idea that came from Claude, um, that I was like, yeah, sure, let's try that. So this is a series of 11 posters of our family's favorite spots from neighborhoods that we have lived in. And I, again, I went really fast here and just did like a very fast brainstorm storm of places that Christoph and I have gone to and loved in different places that we've lived. Um, and all I did was give it the neighborhood name and the name of the place. That is the only thing that I put in here. And Claude actually did, I think, a little bit of research because it knows that this is on Children's Street. Um, and this isn't like a realistic capture of the front of the shop. But it's styled enough that it doesn't really matter. So it came up with like this cool poster, and it made this whole series of posters. Um, so again, I didn't put any effort into this. If I wanted to, I think I could give it a lot more instruction to get the content right and the style right on these. Um, but I thought it was really cool that in one shot it got to this like series of posters that, um, that we could, if we invested in, uh, print, you know, make cool and print and put in our house. So that was kind of a fun one. Um, and then the ones that I'm more excited about that I think continue to really demonstrate what's great about this. So this is an app that I actually have built several times in the AI era, partly to test new AI products and partly 'cause I'm just obsessed with this problem. So I'm sure a lot of you can relate to this. I'm a parent, we have a toddler and one on the way, and she says so many cute, adorable things, and there's so many milestones, and there's so many little memories that I really want to capture and remember and do something with, but I don't. I have never done it. I've tried different things. I've tried capturing like voice notes or photos or, um, whatever it is, but it's just felt like such an effort to capture these moments and like there wasn't a payoff because what am I going to do with them? And so I came into Cloud Design with like this endless problem that I've tried to solve many times. And I just kind of rambled this brief. I want to create this app or system that makes it really easy for me to capture these things that my kid does. And then I told it my problem, that I've tried to do this before and it's a behavior thing. It's not necessarily like a design thing, though design does, um, nudge behavior. Um, but I said it's really hard to get me to put in the time and habit to record these things. And then Claude came back with a bunch of questions, which other products do, but I thought it was great to see the questions that it was asking me. I wonder if it can come— I don't know if I can pull back those questions, but, um, it really interviewed me specifically about this problem and like what I've tried before and what I thought might help and what, um, I wanted Claude to focus on in our initial prototype of this app. So you can kind of see from my answers the types of questions. Um, maybe at some point I can pull that, the questions up, but anyway, that's probably too much detail for this. Um, so I answered a bunch of questions and then Claude kind of came back with a simple plan and then it got to work. And this is the first, like, again, this I haven't gone back to it with anything yet. This is a one-shot that I will show you in screen. Um, so it's called this app Little Book, and right now what we're looking at is like, um, like a plan and various mock-up screens before it really starts building. So it's got like the premise— it's a little bit like a PRD but more real. Um, so it's got the premise, it's got, um Like, it's literally speaking back to me what I said. 4 things that stop me: too many steps, stuff lost, never revisiting, no format. So it's gonna design a system that captures easily, resurfaces, and then helps me commit to— I said I wanted something physical, um, like an annual yearbook that we could print to capture these things. Now it's showing me essentially wireframes of what the capture moment could look like. And already, like, its primary interface that it decided— um, it asked me questions about this, and one of the things I said was like, yeah, maybe iMessage would be a good way to do this. So it's showing me what this could look like in iMessage so I can kind of get a feel for it. And it's, um, giving me a bunch of different like details here. So like really easy to say which kid— it's made up all of these names. Um, here's how easy it is to add a new moment. You can do it as a voice note, um, you can do it as a photo with a quick caption. So I didn't even notice the sticky here before. The zine is the motivation. Show it filling up, week 4 of 13, so they feel it building. So it's kind of building for like me and other people at the same time. Um, so like, I mean, I won't go through this whole thing because it's pretty detailed, but the point is I was really impressed that it is showing me mock-ups of key moments before going all the way in and designing the thing. So, um, if you follow me, you know I love Lovable, and I continue to build loads of stuff in Lovable. And Lovable is so fast. You give it a brief and it builds right away. But here, it's almost slowing down that process to help me really consider what the UI should be and what the nudge behavior should be to actually solve the problem that has not yet been solved in all of my experiments. So here, it's showing kind of the browse and resurface moments. And then here, it's showing what the physical payoff would be. So really thoughtful, like thinking through like, okay, how do we make it really easy to capture? How do we make it really easy to browse and resurface and track, which is part of the motivation. And then how do we make it really easy to print? So I thought this was a really cool example of Claude Design's capabilities and how it differs from some of the other product design and building things. Okay, here is one more work-related example that, that I just ran. So my prompt here was really simple. I said new— I just opened up a new Claude Design, uh, and I said I want to create marketing assets for my course, The AI Business Playbook. Tell me how to get you the context that you need in an easy way, because I want it to do all of this without me needing to do the lowest amount of work possible. So I said the course lives in a lovable site that I custom built. That's That's all I said. And Claude came back and was like, okay, here is the fastest path to share your lovable site with me. Um, share the live URL. And because it's gated, um, I knew that sharing the live URL wasn't going to let Claude see enough of the content. So what I ended up doing, and it gave me a few options here too, including screenshots. So what I ended up doing was I gave it the sales page, um, which is public. And then I gave it 6 screenshots of different experiences within the playbook. And that's it. That's all I did. It was so fast. And it went off and thought and got all of my brand guidelines from, and visual DNA from just those assets. And then it looks like it's come up with its own system, which is based on what I shared with it. Um, but it recreated that. And then it's starting with these starter, the starter assets. Asset, um, which I haven't actually even looked at this in detail yet, but I really like how it lined it up. So it did Instagram single post. So I didn't even tell it which channels, but it's just already made some calls and it's got single posts for Instagram. It's got Instagram, an Instagram carousel that I can use. It's got a LinkedIn asset. It's got a new email header for me. and it's got a better landing hero page, um, that actually showcases the product better. Like, I am just looking at this now, like, this is awesome. Um, so I think it did a really great job capturing the brand and the brand colors. What I'm gonna probably have it do next is video because people are talking about how good it is at video. I actually had it do— I was just curious about video, so I had it do a video of the Mueller Monthly because that was the first thing that I built. And again, this was one shot, and I thought it did a really decent job at this video. Um, you can kind of see some of it here. So I think I'm gonna now get it to do some videos for WatchMeAI because those are always the lowest type of content for me to create for marketing, um, and see how it does with that. And then hopefully ship some of that stuff this week. Okay, so that— it's— we're 4 days into Claude Design. So that is my initial overview of kind of how I've been using it and a few ideas for what I'm using it for so far. I'm sure I will have more content as we go that I will certainly be including in the playbook.