I’ve been using Claude Design for a few weeks to redesign an app I had previously built with Claude Code. I’ve done some design work before, but I’m not a frontend developer and definitely don’t have design chops, so was really curious what’s possible. Pretty happy with the end result, but mostly what I got out of the exercise was a some guidelines on how to use Claude Design with Claude Code effectively. Claude Design is great for rapidly exploring design directions and UX Things like “Show me 3 different designs for this screen that are consistent with my branding and app theme” or “show me 3 different ways to handle this error state that requires user to intervene and fix” helped me find different options I liked quickly. It doesn’t work as a design repository If you follow the strategy above for even a small app, you can pretty rapidly end up with over 100 artboards. I was saving everything for a historical record in case I wanted to revisit a decision. Big mistake. Eventually the web app for Claude Design crashed and I had a hard time getting back in. Lesson learned, you need to clean up artboards as you go. Now I usually Do an exploration in a new page i.e. “create a new page ‘account creation exploration’ and show me 5 designs for …” When I’m done, I copy the final design to a new page “account creation”. Delete the exploration page Tell Claude Design to then review the React source code and remove any unused code from all the removed artboards. That last step is pretty important, I’ve found the design code gets messy really fast. This clean up step often removes several source files and reduces others by 50-70% after a big design exploration. Claude Design is horrible at making icons ChatGPT did much better. Claude Design icons were pretty much unusable. Claude Code and ChatGPT don’t do a good job converting PNG icons to vector formats I wanted my icons as either SVGs or SwiftUI native vector drawings. Claude Code couldn’t do this, I had to create a custom skill to iterate on this conversion. It was more painful than I thought it would be. Some more details and examples here as well as links to the skills and icons. submitted by /u/lundren10
Originally posted by u/lundren10 on r/ClaudeCode