Today I tried to build a design system for this website. I’ve never been able to do this before. Not because I don’t know what good design looks like, but because knowing and making have always been different problems.
Claude Design was released and supposed to close that distance. You point it at your code, it analyzes what’s there, and gives you back a system to judge and refine.
First weird thing: Claude Design is not in the Claude app. I assumed it would be, and when it wasn’t I went down a rabbit hole to check whether it was even included in my Pro subscription. It is. There’s just a separate landing page for it that you have to find. Odd choice.
Once I was in, I clicked the button to create a design system and got a form with a few fields. Almost all of them optional. Optionality is what AI is good at, because then it can just fill in the blanks, which is its favorite pastime. I gave it a short description of the site and the GitHub repo, and off it went.
What came back was usable. Not a rough draft I had to fight with. But a design system. Colors pulled from what I actually have on the site, a typography, spacing and components I’ve been using. I still had to import my fonts manually and fix a few small things, but the bones were there.
Then came the part I didn’t expect to like. You go through the system element by element and either confirm it or tell it what’s off. If something doesn’t feel right you just say so, and it reworks it and shows you the result. This is the loop that matters a lot I think. I’m not designing but judging. And judging is something I can do.
That’s the thing I keep coming back to. For years the bottleneck wasn’t taste, it was the creation. I could look at two buttons and tell you which one was better, I just couldn’t be the one who made the good button (or the bad button for that matter). Still Claude Design doesn’t make me a designer. It makes me someone who can ship something I was already able to evaluate.
Key Insight
The gap between what you can judge and what you can produce is where most non-designers get stuck. AI doesn’t close that gap by teaching you to design. It closes it by making production cheap enough that judgment becomes 99% of the job.
I still don’t know if what I ended up with is any good in a way a real designer would agree with. Probably there are things in it a proper designer would frown upon. But it’s mine, it’s consistent, and I can build on it.