These days, I design everything for my business with Claude: Hero images, infographics, landing pages, product mockups, PDFs, and even full websites and apps.
I’m not an expert when it comes to professional design software like Adobe Illustrator and Figma, but I do have strong opinions about design. I typically know the aesthetic I want, and years of conversion optimization and product development work have shaped how I think about UX.
Still, it’s never made sense for me to prioritize mastering design tools, so for years, my ideas stayed limited to whatever I could pull off in Canva or Google Slides (iykyk).
This has worked fine because simple designs are good enough for my personal business, and when working with bigger companies, I typically partner with professional designers.
Now, working with Claude for design, I’m still able to drive the creative direction the same way I always have, but the quality of the work is no longer limited by my technical design skills or access to professional designers. The reason Claude works so well for me is that I’ve treated it like a professional designer I’m working with. The results come out higher quality and much closer to what I picture than anything I made before. And in a fraction of the time!
The way I work with Claude for design has grown into a repeatable system I use for every project, and this article documents every part of it. This system is not an argument against professional designers, and a good designer could even build and run a system like.
Why Most People Struggle to Design With AI
People struggle to design with Claude because it starts every conversation knowing little to nothing about your brand. That missing context leads to five common issues.
Graphics look generic. AI designs from the average of everything it has ever seen, so without a strong brand point of view, the results look like everyone else’s.
Graphics lack consistency. Even with your hex codes and logo pasted in, AI makes every other decision fresh each time: The layout, the type sizes, the spacing, the decoration. Each graphic can look fine on its own, but side-by-side they look like they came from different brands.
You keep having to repeat the same instructions. Every new chat needs the brand, the dimensions, and the specs explained. When all of that knowledge only lives inside your head, you are the one carrying it from session to session.
Corrections get forgotten. Feedback lives only in the chat where you gave it. Once that conversation ends, the LLM goes back to making the same mistake.
There’s no quality control. A human designer checkS contrast, text size, and how the image will look on each platform before handing it over. Without a system in place, quality control falls to you, and you may not always be aware of the issues.
These problems don't come from a lack of ability. AI can build almost anything you describe. Sharing your hex codes, fonts, and logo isn't enough, because colors and fonts are a small piece of what a designer knows about a brand. Your agent still has to guess at everything else like whether the brand should feel playful or serious, how you prefer to lay things out, what sizes work on each platform, and which ideas you would hate.
A human designer doesn't have any of these problems, because a human designer gets onboarded. They refer to design guidelines and examples of past work to develop a sense of what good looks like for the brand, and as they start to produce work, they incorporate past stakeholder feedback into future work. Conversely, AI typically only gets a short prompt.
My AI design system does that onboarding for me. When a new session starts, Claude has already read my brand materials and my saved feedback, and it checks its own work before showing it to me.
How My Claude Design System Is Organized
My Claude design system has five parts: A design folder, a design guidelines document, a feedback loop, skills, and verification checks. Each part does one job. For example, my infographic skill contains the LinkedIn dimensions and my guidelines document contains my brand colors, so I can change my palette without touching the skill, and update an infographic treatment without any chance of messing up the brand everywhere else.
The components work together. When I correct something, the feedback gets saved as a rule that same day, and rules that generalize get folded into the guidelines document. When getting a new format right takes a lot of back-and-forth, everything we figured out gets packaged as a skill, so the next one takes a fraction of the time to produce at the same quality. The folder collects every finished asset along the way, so each new project starts with more reference material than the last.
📁 The folder structure that turns your past work into Claude’s reference library.
📄 How to build brand guidelines Claude reads before every design task, and why HTML beats a brand PDF or a brand.json.
🔁 The feedback loop that turns your feedback into permanent rules, plus the sync protocol that keeps everything current.
✅ How to make quality control automatic, with Claude checking every design against your standards before you see it.
✍️ The CLAUDE.md rule that makes Claude save every correction automatically.
🛠️ Access to my Claude tools that build the system for you, including a design guidelines creator and a LinkedIn infographic creator.