Discussion

Introducing Claude Design by Anthropic Labs

ej88: This is cool!Seems like Claude is actually building almost like a layered Figma wireframe that you can do fine grained adjustments afterwards (e.g. adjust font size).Interesting that Canva provided a quote of support. I'm not familiar with the differentiation, but it seems like this will directly siphon customers from Canva, right?

albert_e: is this the Figma/Canva/Powerpoint/Keynote killer?

Boss0565: Considering Canva collaborated with them, no?

Sol-: Maybe a collaboration with a metaphorical gun to your head.

PullJosh: I like their emphasis on quickly prototyping many variations of a design. That seems useful, even for experienced designers.

rvz: Useful enough to replace Figma.

namanyayg: The Anthropic team looks to be eating all the usecases and application layer. I personally know of many figma + AI startups that are going to feel shaken up with this launch.Anthropic has distribution on their side, their engineers are excellent (I have ran with them across the ggb in the past and they work 12 hours plus a day regularly.)I think what actually might be slowing them down is the public releases and pr lol, not ideas or execution

subscribed: 12+ hours a day regularly?What a toxic workplace :/

sbszllr: It's interesting how OpenAI and Anthropic effectively mass dumped a bunch of similar features in the last two days.I wonder what other features they're cooking right now.

irishcoffee: I think that's the wrong question. What kind of shadow spy network must exist around all these companies such that they all happen to be working on the same features at the same time.

ossa-ma: The more I think about it the more there is no space in the design world for a tool like this, for a few reasons:- The best design is original, groundbreaking and often counterintuitive. An AI model is incapable of all 3, it will absolutely always converge to the norm and homogeneity (you see it everywhere now, just scroll on ShowHN and take a look at the UIs) and produce the safest design that appeals to its understanding of the ideal user.- Good designers will reject this, they prefer to be hands-on and draw from multiple sources of inspiration which is what Figma boards and Canva is good for, also mainly for cross-collaboration. If you've seen how quickly a great design engineer can prototype you'll know that "speed" they advertise in this video is not worth the tradeoff.- Creatives typically have a very very very high aversion to AI.- Non-designers will not see a purpose for this tool, basic design can already be done through Claude Code and Claude.ai, I fail to see what this could offer unless they leverage a model that is more creative and unique by default (you can not prompt/context/harness engineer creativity believe me I've tried).

mikeaskew4: Thumbs down. Great design is original thought. AI is wholly incapable of that.Go ahead and roast me.

criddell: [delayed]

ljm: I reckon something like this has only been possible to develop because of how homogenous the internet has become in terms of design ever since the glass effect and drop-shadows took over in Web 2.0 and Twitter Bootstrap entered the scene.You'll get a competent UI with little effort but nothing truly unique or mind-blowing.Impressive technology, but that old skool artisanal weirdness of yore only becomes more valuable and nostalgic.

volkk: that's how i've felt about all AI design. the harnesses get better and cooler, and the outputs up the baseline of utter crap to "whoa that doesn't look bad at all!" which works for probably 90% of the web, but anything truly unique still requires a lot of human taste. maybe that will change one day, but I hope it doesn't.

atonse: I've been spending the last two days building a large number of mockups for a new product. Literally the last two days.I'm wondering how i can CONTINUE that in this design thing, can i import something? Because they show it the other way... you can start and edit, and then export to claude code.Until then, I guess it's back to just using CC

coder543: [delayed]

quacked: I hate it so much. Ah, your website/app/program is comprised of rounded-corner cards in four colors (color/pale color/white/grey), with a dark theme. Your clickable text isn't visually distinguishable from your non-clickable text. All of your logos are sans-serif SVGs. Your settings and action menus are split across four different primary hidden locations. Your scroll bars disappear even when there's text hidden offscreen. You try to guess what I want to click on by showing a series of competing horizontally-organized pills over the top of the content instead of just giving me a consistent set of action buttons.AI companies: "good news, everyone! We've automated all those steps so they're even easier to generate!"I think the same thing is happening in physical construction. Ah, I see you've designed a new box with four primary color tones and slightly offset vertical lines to break up the windows.

garrickvanburen: My default position: If an LLM can create it, we probably don't actually need it.

mupuff1234: Most applications just need good enough design.

freedomben: > Great design is original thoughtI don't agree. For novel use cases, yes there's some truth to that. But consistency is huge in a UX. If basic controls work well for a situation, they should be used. Designers should not be getting "creative" or "original" for those sorts of things.

strickjb9: First NanoBanana came for the artists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not an artist.Then Claude came for the designers with Claude Design, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a designer....

jmkni: Unfortunate that linking code from your computer doesn't work with FirefoxVery interesting though

mjr00: There's no shame in being homogenous and obvious, though.If I'm building out an internal tool for, say, a hospital lawyer to search through malpractice lawsuits, I want my tool to be the most familiar, obvious, least-surprising UI/UX possible. Just stay out of the way and do what it's supposed to do.The trick is, of course, that the human is still responsible for knowing when homogenous is fine, or when there's real value in the presentation. If you're making a website for, say, a VST plugin for musicians, your site may need to have a little more "pizzazz" to make your product more attractive to the target audience.

threetonesun: I'd argue it's relatively unimpressive given the ability to create design systems and apply themes to them to create relatively generic content has existed for a long time now.Sure, some prototypes will be spun up more quickly. But if this was a real problem large companies faced it would have been solved in software already.

ctoth: > if this was a real problem large companies faced it would have been solved in software already.Good for everybody who isn't a large company then?

Oras: Data suggest different outcomes, there was always a way to standardise interfaces, from Twitter bootstrap, all the way to shadcn.Not everyone is looking for unique design, 70% of the web is still using Wordpress. I would say majority prefer familiarity and appreciate uniqueness.

alpb: This largely appears to be a HTML generator at its core, not necessarily what Figma does with layers/canvases etc. There's no collaborative nature to it either.It feels like a lightly designed product that moves claude CLI to their backend, generates the HTMLs and renders them in browser on claude.ai website for you. Sure, it accepts your design system as an input from you or imports from your repo, but you could feed the same into claude CLI as well?I'm curious what exactly it gives besides having claude CLI + prompting it well with your design system + skills.

lagrange77: And another step toward a world, where product managers/owners/whatever and other boring people can generate what they once needed creative, passionate and skilled people for. Go ahead, its just the natural evolution of extreme capitalism.

firefoxd: I've been using stich from Gemini, and just plain zAi for helping redesign my website. You can use the generated code to copy and paste the design to fit your own templates, but that's a pain. Unless you are ok with using tailwind and the dozen or so classes on every element and don't want to edit anything.What I found valuable is the design.md that was produced. It's a guide for building each component. So using these tools becomes akin to PSD to html we used do. At least that's when I find them most effective.

gpt5: > The best design is original, groundbreaking and often counterintuitiveDesigning a user inteface involves thousands of small decisions. When trading off pros/cons for each of these decisions, in 99% of the cases, the right answer is ‘optimize familiarity.That’s why Android and iOS look the same, and why the small differences between them are where contention happen.If you adopt existing patterns, your users would be instantly familiar with your app, and the design will not get in their way.

jansan: Well, after having high expectations from watching the intro the actual result of a simple prompt "Bear on a bicycle" is very underwhelming.Maybe AI is not good at everything, yet.

hudo: 404 Page not found when clicking on their link https://claude.ai/design at the end of the article! Vibe coding to prod, gone wrong?

alpb: It's rolling out progressively throughout the day.

baal80spam: Perfect, that's CC design for you :-)

anonfunction: Fourth thing in a row they've announced that I wanted to try and couldn't.Previous comment with the prior 3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47794419

rob: [delayed]

hmokiguess: Who’s the end user for this? I struggle to relate but then again I also don’t use Figma so I may not be the target demographicI have been doing fine just instructing Claude code to use Tailwind and reference design documents

recitedropper: Seems to me like Anthropic is desperately trying to find as many product-market fits as possible before they IPO. They're reaching a chaotic weekly release cadence--each new product chockful of unclear, overlapping capability with their previous.Combine that with the obvious hackernews manipulation that somehow gets each and every haphazard release instantly to the top, and you can see they're starting to feel some real heat.

johnfn: It’s interesting to claim that because everything they do goes to the top on hacker news that they must be in trouble. I haven’t heard that particular chain of effect before.

toomim: "An AI model is incapable of that.""Good designers will reject this."^ Famous last words.

ossa-ma: I will stand by the first point unless models start being trained with different objectives instead of RLHF's three objectives: Helpfulness, Harmlessness and Instruction-followingI will very likely be wrong on the second point.

jayd16: So how much of this is fully generated vs AI running through all the knobs on template widgets?Is that globe made from whole cloth or is there a bespoke "telecom globe" widget that it dropped in? Could I ask for mock up of molecules with the same fidelity of knobs, down to nucleus size and such?

H8crilA: Didn't know that anyone needed to hear that, but here it is: "hot" companies often have such workdays, especially pre-IPO and with such a fast growth.

thunky: > You'll get a competent UI with little effort but nothing truly unique or mind-blowing.This is exactly what I want in a UI.

repelsteeltje: But why?I mean this as a sincere question. Why do we prefer a simple consistent interface over some very cool, innovatieve gesture that only makes sense once you have been fully emerged in the greater context of thuis or that app?!Why are terminals and CLI tools still prevalent?I believe the answer lies in composability, an obvious and ubiquitous feature of any operating system until GUIs.We don't need AI to make GUI design and implementation more easy, we need a better app interface, we need a better OS.

devmor: This stuff is the antithesis of what I want to see AI used for.Deriving a bland average of creativity is the saddest thing you could do. I don’t even enjoy design and I find this offensive.

jonlucc: Claude, add a bit of whimsy to this design.

recitedropper: Plus: So much of excellent user interface design is done through iterating on feedback from live humans testing it with their human sensory system.Until we have embodied AI's with eyes and hands that provide good enough approximations, the aspect of design bottlenecked on human experience will stay bottlenecked.

rglover: You're absolutely correct.But the mass market (who this is ultimately for) doesn't care about great design. They care about "seeing something on the screen." If they can get something that looks 80-90% aligned with what they observe to be modern design, they won't think twice (even if the end result is clunky or not on par with what a professional designer would produce). It's the Ikea Effect on steroids.

qazxcvbnmlp: Exactly. If I am making a tool, I want the users mental energy to be spent on their domain, not bespoke weirdness of my ui choices.

jonlucc: Frequently, two movies with very similar concepts drop the same year. Is that because they're spying, or because the companies make decisions in similar ways based on similar input information?

mpeg: It's rolling out progressively, it works for me – it actually seems very polished, the examples are really good; and it lets you create your design system from your codebase

seydor: Have you seen many original designs in the past 15 years?

jayd16: You could have said the same thing about powerpoint vs high quality marketing departments. The "pros don't want this" argument doesn't really hold weight.This is for non-designers to crank out slop with less effort. They can still be swayed by all the shiny knobs to feel in control.

causal: Will give it a try but my experience with Claude and browser use so far is that it’s extremely lazy: it rarely notices or cares when something doesn’t look right, it needs lots of pointing out “hey you ignored that broken render” etc

GenerWork: If you look at Figmas stock price, it started falling right at 11 AM as this news was released.Anyways, this is 100% a shot at Figma, but also catching Lovable in the crossfire. If anybody from Anthropic is reading this, if you keep developing this with features in Figma and other design tools, you'll have a major hit on your hands.

ex-aws-dude: Isn't this something Figma could easily integrate? Then you'd have the best of both worlds

martinald: Interesting! I wrote this approach up (more or less - extract design system -> make templates -> export) some time ago and I've found it unbelievably powerful: https://martinalderson.com/posts/how-to-make-great-looking-c....I use it all day every day with Claude Code. I sometimes wonder past code if this has had the biggest impact on my day to day productivity, either having to make do with semi-bad looking reports or have a designer design them (which is slow).Sort of feel sorry for Figma in a way though, given all the "partnerships" (highlighting their MCPs) and case studies they've done with Anthropic and then they release this. I note there isn't a testimonial from them this time.I'm surprised how poorly Figma have used "AI" in general - given they were the "gold standard" in taking emerging technologies (WASM etc) and making an incredible product. The Figma Make thing was incredibly underwhelming, I managed to extract the system prompt out and it's basically just Gemini 3 Pro with a design prompt. Perhaps the original team has left?They are extremely exposed imo. While all the UI/UX designers will continue using it for the forseeable, I strongly suspect a lot of their (A/M)RR was coming from extra seats for PMs, developers, etc to view and export and do commenting on the files - not core designer usage. I think a lot of this just won't happen on Figma as much.

mpeg: It's generated, when you try it you can see this is mostly a harness around claude opus 4.7 that helps it create a good design plan, it also supports asking you questions as it goes along, letting you review and feedback on mockups, etc, but ultimately if you look at what it's generating as it does it – it's just code

ossa-ma: You're arguing for familiarity in tactful design, while I agree that for most users this is a good thing, repeatability of existing patterns does create that immediate familiarity.HOWEVER, that familiarity is only a virtue because someone, once, deviated hard enough that their deviation became the new familiar. AI can only optimise toward the current snapshot of "familiar". It cannot produce the next one. If designers outsource all their thinking to a model even in tactful design we would never have groundbreaking design concepts like "pull to refresh" or the command palette.

furyofantares: There's a casual mobile game I have prototyped but have no design for, just bare gameplay. The mockups this thing just gave me are wonderful.It's not going to give me anything truly unique or mind-blowing, sure - but most things aren't. It's a great zoo of options for me to pursue, which I could now pursue on my own or could bring to a designer with a huge headstart in terms of communicating what things I like.

psadri: What’s interesting here is that with AI, all our interfaces should evolve away from previous generation rigid forms / buttons / tables etc. towards something more fluid / dynamic / “natural”. Yet all the AI coding is geared towards producing more of the former.

jayd16: Why would a remix engine move away from what it was trained on?Why would we want to move away from hard fought UX design lessons? Dynamic and fluid UX is infuriating.

xpe: [delayed]

esafak: This is just going to chop the bottom end off, same as with coders. If you are great you get to keep your job.The catch is that the person making the decision might not know or care about the difference.

threetonesun: I wasn't suggesting that the problem would be solved by large companies internally. If anything this is worse for smaller companies, who have already solved this problem for decades at this point by simply not caring about design too much and using the web UI framework du jour. We've already seen with Tailwind that moving to "just put money in the AI machine" comes at the expense of open source UI framework sustainability, with the upside of being slightly faster at making a first-pass boring design.

ezst: By the nature of LLMs, there's no reason to think it would.

ezst: That's why I miss the days of old fashioned GUI toolkits (before the web thought of itself as an application distribution platform): you would just design any app as a bag of typical controls in typical containers, and you and your users would live with the expectation that they would look and feel just like the rest of the operating system, nothing more, nothing less. Frivolity would be generally frowned upon, with the result that applications were overall more homogeneous, effective, discoverable and efficient (also in dev time).

recitedropper: Feeling some heat != in trouble. Just that the pressure cooker is turning to a higher temp.But, I'll gladly admit that I am bias: I'm tired of seeing blatant astroturfing by a company whose main marketing tactic is to play on societal fear, while simultaneously employing safety theatre to look like the "good guys".So take my opinion with a grain of salt :)

raffael_de: there is no problem with yellow, but if everything is yellow then that's a problem. that's his point.

MagicMoonlight: Interestingly, Claude Design has its own completely separate usage bar.

rustystump: I am not so sure. I lean towards client work on desktop/mobile/web and while the initial output is workable as new requirements come in it starts to fall apart largely because the vibe coder doesn’t understand design basics. It is one of those you dont know what you dont know and not that ai cannot write workable css or w/e.

K0IN: this might be a game changer (for show dont tell), and fast itterations in design meetings, to show what your thinking of.

codegeek: On the other hand, Canva made a genius move to partner with Claude for this. One of my favorite products as a non designer.

ctoth: I noticed in your list that you didn't mention accessibility. I would personally rather have an accessible design than one which is "original, groundbreaking and often counterintuitive." and here we are.

ossa-ma: I should have mentioned accessibility. It supports my argument more than yours. Accessibility like captions, voice, keyboard nav, dark mode are all a deviation from the norm by a minority (something AI is completely incapable of doing) and a fight against familiarity which now serves as a great benefit to the majority.

chasd00: > Great design is original thoughtnot really, great design in a web application is no surprises.

atonse: Thank you, I should RTFA next time.

rvz: This tells me that Lovable is certainly not worth $6.6B.

codegeek: "Twitter Bootstrap". Havent heard that term for years. The OG of CSS frameworks.

Sir_Twist: [delayed]

sbszllr: It's possible and even likely there's industrial espionage going on. But imo, you don't need that. I've worked in cutting edge industries, and even when you don't know what your competition is doing, there are usually only so many logical next steps.

xpe: [delayed]

_aavaa_: I’d be more concerned with the stock’s trajectory (continual decline) since the IPO than with whatever happened since 11AM.

wg0: How dangerous is this eh?

paul7986: Web design / digital design is a dying field as businesses will start paying one person who does 3 to 4 roles (PM, UX Research, Design and UI Development - tho why use a design tool for web stuff when AI tools generate designs in code), as well now tons of ppl can do this work using AI tools. Further, is the future of digital experiences user interfaces aka the web or will there be an AI Phone where everything is done / seen on the lock screen (AI generates the visuals as you text or talk to it) and or its more of a text and voice digital experience less UI.Overall after being laid off in January and a 17 year UX Research/Design/Dev career Im starting school in my early 50s to change careers.

Uncorrelated: What career are you aiming to switch to?

LetsGetTechnicl: Oh great more slop

jayd16: "Its just code" is meaningless to me. Is the code its generating using mostly well known widgets with predefined knobs, or is every element completely custom and the knobs are created on the spot with slightly different naming and function every time?I actually think I would prefer the more boring "it composes well known widgets" because then there's a chance I could just use this to generate a presentation layer and integrate it instead of new blobs of code I need to essentially reverse engineer or remake.

mpeg: Depends of what you prompt it... if you tell it to use react and shadcn, it will use that.

Sol-: They are all very wealthy, or are about to be at the IPO. Seems like a worthwhile tradeoff.And money aside, it is certainly one of the most exciting companies in the world to work for.

namanyayg: Exactly the engineers I've talked to are all so EXCITED

coffeebeqn: I think you hit the nail on the head - I bet Adobe and Figma get most of their sold seats from people who don’t really need the full tool and are basically just using it as a viewer and to make very small adjustments or notes

wmeredith: > their engineers are excellent... they work 12 hours plus a day regularlyWhat? In my experience people who are good at their job can get it done in a reasonable amount of time. Working 12 hours a day is obsession, no competence. There can be overlap, but there is no causation.

namanyayg: At a company like Anthropic, which is one of the fastest-growing companies in the world, there is more work than anyone can reasonably deal with

ramathornn: It's funny seeing the Co-founder of Canva commending the product. Yikes!This app is pretty slick, this will funnel a huge number of customers away from Figma + Canva imo.

maerF0x0: you missed that there's an export to canva button. It will funnel users _to_ Canva.

ramathornn: Why would they need to back to Canva? If teams are working within claude already I think they will just offboard canva/figma tasks into claude.

maerF0x0: > voice, video, shaders, 3D and built-in AI.As someone who's thinking about side project-ing a game, this caught my eye.I am curious to explore what Claude can yolo in terms of a retro style indie game... One who's audience might only be me.

est: > how homogenous the internet has become in terms of designI think it's because Steve Jobs killed Flash.

namanyayg: Yeah exactly, if you're seeing your own stock go up like the Anthropic employees are, it's gonna be hard to not work 12 hours

levmiseri: This is reducing the role of Design as some lego-blocks assembling process. And higher quality being seen as adding ‘pizzazz’.You are right, though. Many products don’t need more than that. But I fear that this will greatly impact design innovation and progress. We might get stuck in the current UI paradigm for a long time.

ljm: We can skip Web3... Web 4.0 is twilight gradients, glassmorphism, text size xs in tailwind, and cards and pills for every UI component. Along with self-explanatory help text acting as filler under every header.

bryabaek: such a cheerful background music to celebrate the death of lovable, bolt.new, figma LOL

carimura: Music isn't really new either it's just recombining riffs already created. But the recombinations create new experiences. Might be the same with design?

gnegggh: no info regarding privacy and data if you connect your repo?