So here's the problem I've been banging my head against for six months.

I've been building theAIOS.ai — our AI operating system curriculum for business pros — and the writing was never the bottleneck. I can crank out a lesson in an afternoon. What killed me was everything after. Every module needed a diagram, a process graphic, a cover slide, some kind of visual that made it look what I was talking about real curriculum and not a Google Doc in a trench coat. Every time I'd finish a draft, the design work added another three days. And it still looked like I did it in a hurry, because I did.

So I've been trying to automate that pipeline. I've wired up Midjourney. I've wired up Ideogram. Finally, I I've wired up GPT Image. Each of them makes pretty things. None of them hold a brand. Ask for a slide in our flame orange (#f44800) and electric blue (#2563EB), on a dark background, with that specific illustration style — and you get something close, and then on the next generation you get something different, and on the next one you get something that belongs in a different company's slide deck entirely.

Then on April 17, Anthropic shipped Claude Design. And the economics flipped.

How I stopped making brand assets by hand — and the workflow you can copy this afternoon.

Claude Design is a research preview at claude.ai/design, running on Anthropic Claude Opus 4.7. It takes text prompts, uploaded documents, or your codebase as inputs and spits out prototypes, pitch decks, one-pagers, slide decks, and UI mockups. You can export to Canva, PDF, PPTX, or standalone HTML. It's live right now for Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise subscribers — Enterprise admins, heads-up: it's default-off and you'll need to flip it on.

That part — another AI design tool — is not the news. Figma has Make. Canva has Magic Studio. The feature that matters is this:

During onboarding, Claude reads your existing codebase and design files and builds a design system. Colors, typography, components, spacing. Then it uses that system as a constraint on every generation. You stop fighting the model to stay on-brand. The brand is now a rail.

That's the part I want to show you how to use.

Before the setup, the honest filter. If one of these three jobs is your week, keep reading. If none of them are, this isn't your tool yet — and that's fine. But I think if you create documents and you need graphs, or other embellishments, Claude Design is going to be a great tool someday.

1. You need images and don't want to fight a model for them. Social posts, LinkedIn headers, podcast covers, blog hero graphics, internal-comms visuals. You have a brand. You want the output to look like it the first time, not the seventh. Claude Design's brand-as-rails approach is the closest I've seen to making that real.

2. You need to upgrade a presentation or an ad. The workflow diagram for the slide that's been a wall of bullet points for two months. The illustration for the keynote you're giving Thursday. The test variant for the Meta campaign you're spinning up this week. Execution-grade visual work that used to mean a designer ticket and a three-day wait.

3. You're a marketing pro and you want a factory. One-pagers, sales sheets, partner co-marketing decks, customer recap reports, event signage, training covers — the same five or six document types your team remakes every month. Set the brand system once, then crank them out in minutes. The payoff compounds the second time you reuse the project, and again the third.

The through-line on all three: easy to use, on-brand by default, and built for the 90% of work that doesn't need a hero designer — it just needs to ship looking like you.

Here’s the thing unless you have a number of meticulously crafted prompts with examples that can inform what your output should look like you probably won’t get consistent outcomes. And even then that will be difficult to maintain consistency. Claude Design actually gets down to the nitty gritty of your style by detailing what you want in almost painful detail. Then it can reference those details as it creates your files.

Step 1 — Gather your brand assets (5 minutes). You need: your logo files (SVG preferred, PNG works), exact hex codes for your colors, the names of your brand fonts, and two to three real documents that represent what "on-brand" looks like. Not aspirational templates. Actual things you've shipped that you're proud of. For us that meant numerous human-generated documents a recent AI Deep Dive PDF, one AIE Network one-pager, and the AIOS homepage.

Step 2 — Create a Claude Design project and upload everything (2 minutes). One project per brand. If you run multiple brands like I do (The AIE Network, All Things AI, Peripety), keep them separate. Claude will blend the systems if you don't, and you'll hate the output.

Step 3 — Generate a sample on a real project, not a dummy (5 minutes). This is where most people screw up. Don't prompt "make me a sample slide." Prompt with a real assignment: "Design a one-pager summarizing this week's AI Advantage newsletter for a CMO, highlighting three takeaways and a CTA to subscribe." Feed it the actual content. Real input produces real output that tells you if the system locked.

Step 4 — Correct the drift, specifically (5 minutes). The first generation will be 80% there. Tell Claude exactly what's off. Not "make it better." Instead: "The headline font is too light — use our display font at 600 weight." "The orange is too muted — we use #f44800, full saturation." "The CTA button needs to be pill-shaped, not square." Specificity is the whole job. Three or four corrections and the system settles.

Step 5 — Lock the system and batch-generate (3 minutes to set up, then reuse forever). Once the output is on-brand, save the design system. Now every new prompt against the project inherits it. For theAIOS.ai, I now generate 10 training module covers in the time it used to take me to fix one in Canva.

I'd be selling you a bill of goods if I didn't tell you what's still rough. For example, I tried to update the logo for my podcast, Rogue Agents.

Raster-to-vector conversion is still a black hole — and that's not really Claude's fault. I fed it the raster logo (these logos have high detail but they get blurry when you make them bigger) for the Rogue Agents Podcast and asked it to rebuild a clean vector version. It didn't get there. Honestly, no tool I've tested does this well. A vector logo is a set of intentful mathematical paths; a raster is a grid of pixels. Going pixels-back-to-paths is closer to reverse-engineering than redrawing, and the models are built for the opposite direction. If you have an SVG, use it. If you only have a PNG, redraw it in Illustrator or Figma — don't expect any AI to do it for you yet.

It holds style across short documents, not long ones. A 5-slide deck stays consistent. By slide 20, I see drift — type sizing shifts, accent colors get more interpretive. The fix is generating in chunks of five and reassembling.

Illustration style is harder than color and type. Claude nails the easy part of a brand (palette, hierarchy, layout) fast. The hard part — the specific feeling of your illustration or photography — takes more training documents and more correction rounds.

It can't do everything, and that's fine. This isn't for your hero marketing campaign where you need a human designer to fight for something weird and great. This is for the other 90% — the internal decks, the training slides, the one-pagers, the ads you're testing into a Meta campaign this week. Execution work that used to eat your designer's calendar and can now get done while you're on a different call.

If you've been watching me for a while, you know I lean on Amara's Law — we overestimate technology in the short run, underestimate it in the long run. Claude Design is one of those moments where the short-run bet is obvious: you can use this today, and you should. But not because it’s great, but just like a new employee it will learn from you and become a great employee.

The long-run bet is the more interesting one. Brand-as-rails won't stop at design. Once a model can hold your brand system, the same approach scales to your voice, your editorial standards, your formatting — every "this is how we do it here" rule that currently lives in a designer's or writer's head. That's the second-order shift worth preparing for, regardless of what Anthropic, Figma, or anyone else ships next.

The assignment is small. Go set up a Claude Design project for your brand. Use your real brand assets, a real document, and the five steps above. Time it. If it takes more than 30 minutes, email me and tell me where you got stuck — I'll figure out what I left out of the tutorial.

The tool is the tool. The payoff is that your brand is now a reusable asset a machine can execute against. That's new. Use it.

I appreciate your support.