Claude Design is amazing

I had some downtime at our summer cottage in Punkaharju this week and decided to take on re-designing this website. Some time ago I moved from Wordpress to Ghost to make the website lighter and less compute heavy. It has been a good move, but given that I had worked with Wordpress for more then a decade I hadn't taken the time to learn Ghost's design system and how it works.

Fast forward to this week when I opened Claude Design (still in beta) from my Claude desktop app and was immediately positively surprised. It immediately clicked for me.

I started off with a request that I wanted to redesign my website that was hosted via the Ghost CMS. I gave some preliminary requests and thoughts. Claude Design came back with a short questionnaire on where to take this. After a while I had three proposals in front of me from which I took time to iron out a suitable version. I deliberately asked it to leverage the design system in how it would design the front page of the website and I believe I also asked it to check my current design so that I could comment what I liked and didn't.

Once we had the front page ironed out, I could use the tweaks functionality to directly edit specific parts. I also used the comments functionality and ask it to change them for me - essentially enabling more elaborate and complex requests. It was like talking to a super fast, talented designer that immediately knew where you wanted to take the design.

After the front page it listed all the pages that still needed designing and we went through them one by one. Once everything was ready, it simply packaged the design into a zip-file that works with Ghost and asked me to upload it to the CMS. I was expecting a few hiccups here and there, but everything worked out of the box straight away.

I did end up making multiple additions and edits afterward, so Claude created versioning for my theme and this way it kept updating the same design withing Ghost.

Having spent multiple evenings, sometimes for weeks, designing personal websites, this simply blew me away. It took me about 2.5 hours to come up with the current design, including ironing out small glitches that I found here and there.

I think Claude Design is a very powerful addition to the Anthropic family and while there are other services with similar capabilities out there, like Lovable and ChatGPT - they're essentially approaching the design challenge from a different user path. With Claude Design, it is like talking to a talented designer who keeps iterating it for you. Where as ChatGPT is able to make designs for you, I've never liked the approach of simply re-creating a design for you. To be honest, I haven't used ChatGPT for a while now and can't fully comment how it could handle website designs. Claude Design is able to tackle design work as it should be - tweaking the details here and there, while keeping the bigger picture untouched.

This to me enforces the personal experience I've been privileged to learn over the years; you can solve the same problem in many different ways. The approach itself can also be the innovation at the end of the day and make a difference who wins the market.

I've spent a ton of time this summer (when on the phone or computer) talking to Claude. It has become a core part of debugging things, be it a server or figuring out Fibaro Smart implant wiring and connectivity issues with Home Assistant. Fable and Opus 5 are incredible models that truly stand out from the previous models.

I can definitely see myself developing a design system for my company to be leveraged in other collateral, be it pitch decks or stationary that may be needed.