Anthropic Labs, the Claude-maker’s AI safety and research division, on Friday launched Claude Design, a new service in research preview that promises to generate polished design systems, website prototypes, interactive websites, slide decks, one-pagers, and similar artifacts where you’d usually need to hire a designer or use a product like Canva or Figma to get started.Today’s launch doesn’t necessarily come as a surprise. Earlier this week, The Information reported that Anthropic was working on a design tool. Meanwhile, Anthropic’s chief product officer, Mike Krieger, resigned from Figma’s board earlier this week. Figma’s stock, already down almost 50% over the last 12 months, lost another 5% right after Claude Design launched.Let designers explore until the tokens run outAnthropic notes that Claude Design is meant to give “designers room to explore widely and everyone else a way to produce visual work.” That is, until their tokens run out, of course. Claude Design comes with its own weekly limits if you have a paid Claude plan (Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise) and the system is hungry for tokens. After building a design system and a news website prototype based on it, along with a few tweaks and one explainer video, I had already used over 50% of my weekly allotment. Once you reach that, you’ll dip into pay-as-you-go token costs.To be fair, you get the choice to build only a wireframe instead of a polished mockup, and the wireframes (or a basic slide deck) would’ve likely used fewer tokens, but half the fun of using a tool like Claude is to be able to experiment in ways that weren’t previously possible.Using Claude DesignTo get started, the service will build a design system for you. You can feed it your codebase and existing design files (or really any other visual assets), and it’ll go to work. One nice aspect of this process is that it gives you the last word on virtually every aspect. It’ll choose colors and fonts, and create the design elements for you, but you get to approve those or ask for changes.Claude Design’s take on a redesigned New Stack homepage in the style of Joshua Topolsky (credit: The New Stack).You can also go back later and make changes after you’ve seen the final results.To have Claude fine-tune the result, you can also comment on specific design elements in the preview, similar to what OpenAI is doing with the new Codex for building visual assets. But Claude Design goes a bit further by letting you draw on designs and edit some elements directly (like background colors, fonts, etc.). But the most interesting option here is to have the model generate sliders and options you’d like to see to tweak the design in real-time without having to ask Claude for changes.How designers will use this remains to be seen, but Anthropic argues that it’ll be great for creating realistic prototypes, product mockups, pitch decks, and marketing collateral, but also for frontier design, where a designer may want to build code-powered prototypes and general design explorations that may otherwise be too time-consuming or cumbersome.ExportsOnce the work in Claude Design is done, it can export designs as PDFs, PowerPoint slides, or standalone HTML files. But there is also the option to send them to Canva (not Figma) or hand off the design to Claude Code to turn it into a working product.It’d be nice if the service also offered an option to share a working prototype with a team directly, without having to export it, but this is a preview, after all. “Over the coming weeks, we’ll make it easier to build integrations with Claude Design, so you can connect it to more of the tools your team already uses,” the Anthropic team also notes in the announcement.The post Anthropic launches Claude Design, a Figma and Canva rival built on Claude appeared first on The New Stack.