Anthropic is known for its industry-leading Claude Code that writes programs, but why stop there? The company, on Friday, introduced a research preview service called Claude Design that creates visual assets, potentially putting some folks out of work.

No sooner had Claude Design been announced than the stock of design biz Figma fell about 7 percent. Claude Design also represents a shot across the bow of Lovable, an AI design service.

Based on Claude Opus 4.7, Anthropic's just-released, more costly model, Claude Design is accessible via the palette icon on the Claude.ai left-hand navigation frame to Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise subscribers.

"Claude Design gives designers room to explore widely and everyone else a way to produce visual work," Anthropic said in a blog post. "Describe what you need and Claude builds a first version. From there, you refine through conversation, inline comments, direct edits, or custom sliders (made by Claude) until it's right."

Anthropic expects Claude Design will be useful for design prototyping, product wireframes and mockups, design explorations, pitch decks and presentations, and marketing materials.

The service includes the option to set up your own design system. This involves providing links to GitHub repositories, local code files, uploaded Figma files, folders with fonts, logos, and other assets, and text notes to guide the underlying LLM.

Thereafter, projects inherit this style information, so designs don't start from scratch.

Instead of manual dexterity and perhaps some art edu, working with Claude Design requires the ability to craft prompts. "You don't need to be a designer to get great results," company documentation declares. "Be specific about what you're building, who it's for, and what matters most."

After this conversational design process, users have the option to download the results in various formats (.zip, .pdf, .pptx) or to export the results to Canva, HTML, or Claude Code.

Usage of Claude Design is metered and tracked separately from other Claude services. "It has its own usage tracking, its own allowances, and – for subscription plans – its own weekly limits that sit alongside (not inside) your existing chat or Claude Code limits," Anthropic explains.

The AI biz is offering Enterprise usage-based Claude Design users a taste, in the form of a one-time credit said to cover about 20 typical prompts. The credit is consumed before additional Claude Design usage counts toward organizational spend and expires on July 17.

Only a month ago, in a graphic design forum on Reddit, someone made a post that reads, "You can't spell 'laid-off' without AI."

Yet that narrative – that AI is coming to take creative jobs – may be too simplistic.

Molly McCoy, a graphic designer based in the San Francisco Bay Area, told The Register in an interview that she hasn't really done much using AI tools. 

"I don't really use AI," McCoy said. "I've been a professional graphic designer for twenty-five years and I see it as a tool. But for what I'm doing, which is print work, everything has to go on a football-field-size printing press and AI is really more theoretical.

"I've been using my brain to do some of the things that AI does and when I dabbled with it, I was like, 'oh this is like a slot machine that doesn't hit.'"

She said she's had clients who have been satisfied with AI work. "So I'm impressed with that, but for my own workflows, it has not had any presence or impact."

McCoy said she sees how AI-driven design has a high degree of influence on social media, where the graphics are more disposable.

"They don't have to be of any degree of quality," she said. "They don't have to last for any amount of time. And I think that AI probably does help people with their mock-ups and whatnot, but if you don't understand the different tiers of the design industry, it might be hard to understand how something like this might impact it."

McCoy expects tools like Claude Design will have an impact on the corporate design world, where there's a lot of money and not so much flexibility.

"There's a lot of rigidity to the degree of creativity that you can use," she said. "So it's probably gonna be great in that environment because it's just gonna spit out something that already happened."

McCoy said that she works a lot with a younger designer who has only been in the field for a few years, and there's a lot of discussion around whether designers are losing work to AI.

"Well I wouldn't know if I didn't have that work anymore," she said. "I don't think so, you know. But there is a very different skill set involved in running a design business versus being a designer and I do both. And the design business is about the relationship."

McCoy said with a laugh, "I guess AI can be your therapist for you, but it's not gonna be able to take the things that you tell it and say like, 'okay, all right, well let's talk about that a little bit more. And let's think about this angle and let's consider everyone's feelings.' So I'm not yet ready to be scared of the end of design. I think it's gonna make a lot of stuff cheaper. They've been trying to make us go faster forever." ®