Don't Worry Designers! I Tested Claude Design a Day After Launch

Anthropic shipped Claude Design, a new AI design tool built on their freshly released Opus 4.7 model, and I jumped in a day after release to see if designers should be worried. I can see the platform they're building and some of it is seriously impressive, but the AI generation hit a lot of limits. Short answer? Not yet!

Why test a closed source tool?

I'm a massive believer in decentralised AI, but when a closed source competitor is shipping genuinely valuable products every week, I pay very close attention. Part of the research I do is figuring out the open source alternative, in case Anthropic ever discontinues a product or cancels your account.

My advice for small businesses is to get in and play with the free tiers of the big tech tools, but always keep privacy, your data and cost in mind. A lot of it can be done with open source if your team is big enough to support it.

What is Claude Design?

Opus 4.7 is pitched as much stronger at visual design, websites and presentations, and Claude Design is the product built around it. It's on Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise plans, and at the time I tested it, it was only on the website (claude.ai), not in Claude Desktop. There's a new Design icon under chats, projects, artifacts and code.

You chat on the left and the output appears on the right. It can do wireframes and mock-ups similar to Figma, slide decks, websites and marketing collateral, and it supports templated prompts. Some of the templates are really cool: cosmic-scale science animations, custom loading animations instead of boring spinners, and shader wallpapers that change colour as you hover. And they give you the prompts!

What worked?

I ran the iridescent card template and it was great. Claude broke it into four subtasks, wrote a design plan and listed the "tweaks" to expose (tilt strength, perspective depth and so on). After 2 to 3 minutes I had a 3D card that changed colour on hover, with sliders for tilt, glow colour, noise, card type and an auto-float button. It even checked its own output to make sure it looked like a card. It looked better than the template example, and you could build a legit web card game on it.

The rest of the UX is solid too:

• Click any object and edit its colour, font, size or text
• Leave comments for teammates, or send a comment straight to Claude
• Draw notes and arrows anywhere on the canvas
• Present full screen
• Export as an HTML zip, standalone HTML file, PDF or PowerPoint, send to Canva, or hand off to Claude Code to build it out for real

Editing text is easier than Figma. I couldn't drag and drop or resize divs, though, and setting a box to "left" alignment didn't move it at all.

What didn't work?

Then I asked for a 3D sports car with the same effects. It self-corrected when the panels looked like flat rectangles, which is impressive, but the result looked pretty much like trash. So I got normal Claude to write a much more detailed Porsche-style prompt and started a fresh project. This time it wasn't even 3D, just a 2D sprite of a sports car I've never seen before.

My usual test for any model that claims to be good at design is recreating apple.com for a different product, so I asked for an Apple car launch page. It pushed back on copying someone else's website, then gave me a really good branding questionnaire (aesthetic, colour, copy tone) and set up its own design system. The page itself was pretty blank: placeholder images, a menu where most links didn't work, and when I asked for pictures it said it couldn't generate copyrighted imagery and drew SVGs instead. The car looked like a weird stretched limousine from the '60s. About 8 minutes in, I had very little to show for it.

So should designers be worried?

Not yet! Doing anything from scratch with imagery is still hard, and game devs can relax too because 3D model creation isn't there. Some templates work and some don't, and a normal person can't just rock up and build something awesome in one sentence. Next I want to feed it my own assets, like a PDF to redesign into a website, and I'll put together guides once I find workflows that are proven.

For guides on the more established Claude features, plus open source alternatives, check out liberati.life. Have a good weekend designers and game devs, catch you in the next one!