I’ve been working on GMC’s rebrand for months. Brand identity, design system, a custom SDK to generate marketing assets. Last week Anthropic launched Claude Design — and it rebuilt my entire brandbook in five minutes.
I don’t know whether to laugh or feel validated. Probably both.
I wasn’t just working on GMC’s visual identity — I was building the design system behind it. If you’ve never worked with one, the distinction matters: identity is how a brand looks and sounds. The design system is the modular layer that keeps that coherence at scale. Same tone in the welcome message whether it’s an app or a website. Same feel across CTAs on different platforms. No reinventing the wheel every time you need a banner.
Before Claude Design, I tried to solve this with Google’s Stitch. A real step forward for visual consistency across screens — you could request changes in natural language and it would respect the approved style. Good export functionality too. But something felt off: I couldn’t see the full system at once. Everything was built from whatever the UI had in context — the chat, the screens. That was it. I kept feeling like I was building on top of something I couldn’t fully see.
So I built my own SDK.
It’s not a public tool — it’s internal. Reusable components for generating marketing assets in a modular, consistent way. Banners, content pieces, visual assets. All on-brand, all coherent with each other.
What I built with Claude Code works. But it required knowing exactly what to ask for, how to structure it, when the output was good and when it wasn’t. And using it means either wrapping it into a mini app or creating an agent skill.
The barrier to entry was high.
That’s exactly what Claude Design lowers.
You describe what you want in the chat — or mark directly on the design with a pen tool — and you can refine the design system, iterate fast, and export to PDF, URL, PPTX, or send straight to Canva for collaborative editing. When it’s ready to build, you hand it off to Claude Code in a single instruction. The full loop: exploration → prototype → production code, all inside Anthropic’s ecosystem.
Did what I built become obsolete? No. And that’s the point I want to make.
When I loaded my work into Claude Design, it understood everything in five minutes — because the work was solid. The definitions were clear. The components had internal logic. The system was coherent. If I’d shown up with something half-baked, Claude Design wouldn’t have saved it.
The tool lowered the barrier to building coherent brand identities — that’s real and it matters. But the barrier it lowered is the technical one, not the conceptual one. You still need to know what you want. You still need the judgment to evaluate the output. You still need to have thought through the system.
Starting Monday (when my quota resets) I’ll be able to focus more on the what than the how. That’s a real gain.
But the what is still mine.
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