Nate Parrott, a product designer at Anthropic, shares how he uses Claude Design (in beta) to explore, iterate on, and share visual ideas early, from product prototypes to slide decks and animations.
In the fall of 2025, I was the only product designer on Claude Code for VS Code：https://code.claude.com/docs/en/vs-code, working with two engineers to reimagine everything Claude Code does for a friendly interface outside the terminal. We shipped the beta：https://www.anthropic.com/news/enabling-claude-code-to-work-more-autonomously at the end of September, Opus 4.5 arrived：https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-4-5 in November, and the Claude Code team started shipping fast and aggressively. The engineers were shipping far more than before, while I was still delivering at the pace I always had. I needed to find a way to catch up.
Claude Code runs in the terminal, where everything is text-based, and my first attempt treated it that way: I copied output into Claude, added screenshots, and asked, "Here's a feature we want to add. Why don't you design it?" The results weren't good. For a month or so, as a side project, I kept looking for ways to improve Claude’s design output.
Eventually I stumbled onto the answer: Claude is really good with HTML. We think of HTML as the format for websites, but it's also a rich, interactive visual medium: anything you can make in a slide deck, a video file, or a PDF, you can make in a web page. So I prompted Claude to make HTML, and gave it a split-view interface where you could chat on the left and see the output on the right.
That was useful, but product design is driven by applying knowledge of the product and brand you work on, so as a next step I spent a while distilling the essence of Anthropic's brand (the fonts, colors, assets, and principles our products use) into prompts. This way, when I type my prompt into the tool, the output is compliant with the Anthropic brand guide.
I put all that into a small internal prototype and shared it with the team. Product designers picked it up immediately for interactive prototypes. Making a click-through prototype in traditional design tools means mocking up every state of every screen and wiring them together by hand. Here, you hand Claude your assets and say: make it work. Every artifact it delivers has a link you can share the way you'd share a doc.
I first realized how compelling Claude Design was at an idea pitch session during an Anthropic Labs：https://www.anthropic.com/news/introducing-anthropic-labs team offsite: every person there threw together slides using it, often in the middle of the meeting before their turn to present. That session convinced the Labs team to staff it, and Claude Design went from a side project to a real project.
We stopped describing it as a tool for product mockups. Claude Design became a tool for producing any kind of visual communication: slide decks, landing pages, one-pagers you print as a PDF, emails, animations, visuals to share on social media. I think of it as one click above product design: you collaborate with Claude on visuals whose main job is communication and ideation.
As models get better at vision, so does the range and quality of work Claude Design can do. Our latest Opus-class model, Claude Opus 5：https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-5, is better than previous Opus models at reading the charts, diagrams, and screenshots, making it powerful when paired with Claude Design for creating presentation-worthy decks and memos.
Claude Design doesn't have an image model and isn’t built for image generation, so it's a poor fit for logo design—though that hasn’t stopped people from trying. The better approach here is to bring in the logo and assets you already have. The rest of the product works the same way: Claude creates options and starting points so you don’t have to stare at a blank canvas, and you choose what's good on its own, or as a combination of multiple versions.
And if you're shipping production software, stick with Claude Code. Claude Code is for coding; Claude Design is for the other parts of the design work: early ideation, collaboration, or getting buy-in on a direction before anyone commits to building it. The two work together round-trip, so you can sync a prototype you started in Claude Code to Claude Design for iteration and editing on the canvas, or hand off a prototype you’re ready to build from Claude Design to Claude Code. As models get better at building production software, the work that matters most moves earlier in the process: having good ideas, getting everyone aligned, and collecting feedback while an idea is still early.
I use Claude Design every day for what you’d call bread-and-butter design work: wireframing early ideas, or generating 15 versions of a flow to collect feedback from colleagues. Some recent examples from my own work:
There's a Bret Victor talk every designer should watch at some point, called Stop Drawing Dead Fish：https://vimeo.com/64895205. From the blurb: "Everything we draw should be alive by default."
I'd encourage designers, in Claude Design or any other tool, to think about how to make their creations alive. My favorite Claude Design creations are the ones that don't fit into existing boxes: docs with interactive simulations, slide decks that talk to you, diagrams that are also videos, designs that are also their own editors. Code, specifically HTML, is an amazing medium for creativity, and it's finally somewhat easy for designers to create with.
Claude Design took its current shape because people at Anthropic kept finding uses I hadn't planned for; it is now available in beta on Claude Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise plans. Try it：https://claude.com/product/design and take it somewhere we haven't thought of yet.
This article was written by Nate Parrott, a product designer at Anthropic, and expresses his opinions, usage patterns, and advice on Claude Design.
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Hi Claude! Could you help me develop a unique voice for an audience? If you need more information from me, ask me 1-2 key questions right away. If you think I should upload any documents that would help you do a better job, let me know. You can use the tools you have access to— like Google Drive, web search, etc.—if they’ll help you better accomplish this task. Do not use analysis tool. Please keep your responses friendly, brief and conversational. Please execute the task as soon as you can—an artifact would be great if it makes sense. If using an artifact, consider what kind of artifact (interactive, visual, checklist, etc.) might be most helpful for this specific task. Thanks for your help!
Hi Claude! Could you improve my writing style? If you need more information from me, ask me 1-2 key questions right away. If you think I should upload any documents that would help you do a better job, let me know. You can use the tools you have access to— like Google Drive, web search, etc.—if they’ll help you better accomplish this task. Do not use analysis tool. Please keep your responses friendly, brief and conversational. Please execute the task as soon as you can—an artifact would be great if it makes sense. If using an artifact, consider what kind of artifact (interactive, visual, checklist, etc.) might be most helpful for this specific task. Thanks for your help!
Hi Claude! Could you brainstorm creative ideas? If you need more information from me, ask me 1-2 key questions right away. If you think I should upload any documents that would help you do a better job, let me know. You can use the tools you have access to— like Google Drive, web search, etc.—if they’ll help you better accomplish this task. Do not use analysis tool. Please keep your responses friendly, brief and conversational. Please execute the task as soon as you can—an artifact would be great if it makes sense. If using an artifact, consider what kind of artifact (interactive, visual, checklist, etc.) might be most helpful for this specific task. Thanks for your help!
Hi Claude! Could you explain a complex topic simply? If you need more information from me, ask me 1-2 key questions right away. If you think I should upload any documents that would help you do a better job, let me know. You can use the tools you have access to— like Google Drive, web search, etc.—if they’ll help you better accomplish this task. Do not use analysis tool. Please keep your responses friendly, brief and conversational. Please execute the task as soon as you can—an artifact would be great if it makes sense. If using an artifact, consider what kind of artifact (interactive, visual, checklist, etc.) might be most helpful for this specific task. Thanks for your help!
Hi Claude! Could you help me make sense of these ideas? If you need more information from me, ask me 1-2 key questions right away. If you think I should upload any documents that would help you do a better job, let me know. You can use the tools you have access to— like Google Drive, web search, etc.—if they’ll help you better accomplish this task. Do not use analysis tool. Please keep your responses friendly, brief and conversational. Please execute the task as soon as you can—an artifact would be great if it makes sense. If using an artifact, consider what kind of artifact (interactive, visual, checklist, etc.) might be most helpful for this specific task. Thanks for your help!
Hi Claude! Could you prepare for an exam or interview? If you need more information from me, ask me 1-2 key questions right away. If you think I should upload any documents that would help you do a better job, let me know. You can use the tools you have access to— like Google Drive, web search, etc.—if they’ll help you better accomplish this task. Do not use analysis tool. Please keep your responses friendly, brief and conversational. Please execute the task as soon as you can—an artifact would be great if it makes sense. If using an artifact, consider what kind of artifact (interactive, visual, checklist, etc.) might be most helpful for this specific task. Thanks for your help!
Hi Claude! Could you explain a programming concept? If you need more information from me, ask me 1-2 key questions right away. If you think I should upload any documents that would help you do a better job, let me know. You can use the tools you have access to— like Google Drive, web search, etc.—if they’ll help you better accomplish this task. Do not use analysis tool. Please keep your responses friendly, brief and conversational. Please execute the task as soon as you can—an artifact would be great if it makes sense. If using an artifact, consider what kind of artifact (interactive, visual, checklist, etc.) might be most helpful for this specific task. Thanks for your help!
Hi Claude! Could you look over my code and give me tips? If you need more information from me, ask me 1-2 key questions right away. If you think I should upload any documents that would help you do a better job, let me know. You can use the tools you have access to— like Google Drive, web search, etc.—if they’ll help you better accomplish this task. Do not use analysis tool. Please keep your responses friendly, brief and conversational. Please execute the task as soon as you can—an artifact would be great if it makes sense. If using an artifact, consider what kind of artifact (interactive, visual, checklist, etc.) might be most helpful for this specific task. Thanks for your help!
Hi Claude! Could you vibe code with me? If you need more information from me, ask me 1-2 key questions right away. If you think I should upload any documents that would help you do a better job, let me know. You can use the tools you have access to— like Google Drive, web search, etc.—if they’ll help you better accomplish this task. Do not use analysis tool. Please keep your responses friendly, brief and conversational. Please execute the task as soon as you can—an artifact would be great if it makes sense. If using an artifact, consider what kind of artifact (interactive, visual, checklist, etc.) might be most helpful for this specific task. Thanks for your help!
Hi Claude! Could you write grant proposals? If you need more information from me, ask me 1-2 key questions right away. If you think I should upload any documents that would help you do a better job, let me know. You can use the tools you have access to — like Google Drive, web search, etc. — if they’ll help you better accomplish this task. Do not use analysis tool. Please keep your responses friendly, brief and conversational. Please execute the task as soon as you can - an artifact would be great if it makes sense. If using an artifact, consider what kind of artifact (interactive, visual, checklist, etc.) might be most helpful for this specific task. Thanks for your help!
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