Claude Design: how to create mockups and visual briefs without a designer

Until April 2026, getting a mockup of a landing page or a visual layout for an email campaign required one of the following: an available designer, a Figma subscription with its learning curve, or a lot of patience and plenty of luck with Canva templates.

Then Anthropic launched Claude Design, and some Italian SMEs are already rewriting their creative process.

In this article we explain what it is, how it works in practice for people in marketing, and when it makes sense to use it instead of other tools.

What Claude Design is and who it’s for

Claude Design is the visual feature built directly into Claude.ai, available to subscribers on the Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise plans. It isn’t a separate app: you’ll find it in the left-hand sidebar of the interface, at claude.ai/design.

The starting point is simple. Describe what you want: a landing page, an email layout, a visual brief, a feature prototype. The tool builds a first version, you see it in the built-in preview, and from there you work through successive refinements in plain language, without manually touching a single layer or component.

It isn’t aimed at professional designers, who already have far more precise tools for their work. It’s aimed at people who have always needed something visual but lacked the skills or time to produce it: founders, product managers, marketing managers, small agency teams. People who have always ended up writing long briefs and hoping someone else would turn them into images.

With Claude Design, you do that translation yourself.

How Claude Design works in practice

The interface follows a conversational logic. On the left is the chat, on the right the project preview. You write an instruction, Claude generates or edits the output, you assess it and carry on.

The basic workflow

The quickest way to start is to describe what you want as specifically as possible. Not “make me a landing page” but “make me a landing page for a B2B SEO consultancy service, with a benefit-led headline, three value blocks, a contact form and a professional but direct tone”.

The more context you give, the more relevant the result is from the very first version. Then you refine with follow-up instructions: “move the form to the top”, “change the button colour”, “add a section with three testimonials”. The feature keeps track of the conversation’s context and applies the changes without starting from scratch.

Importing your own design system

If you already have a defined brand identity, you can import it directly. Claude Design accepts GitHub repositories, design files and manual asset uploads. After analysing them, it builds a design system with the brand’s own colours, typography and components, and uses it as the basis for all subsequent projects.

For an agency or a team managing several clients, this means not starting over from generic templates every time. Claude is already working inside your visual system.

Export and handoff

The files it generates can be exported to PDF, PowerPoint or standalone HTML, or sent straight to Canva for further editing. If you also use Claude Code, there’s a direct handoff: the prototype is packaged with implementation instructions and passed to the coding agent without any extra documentation.

What you can create with Claude Design: marketing use cases

Mockups for email campaigns

Before sending a brief to the designer or the email marketer, you can build a visual layout of the campaign: structure, content hierarchy, CTA placement, the balance between text and image. It isn’t the final file, but it’s something concrete to align on, which cuts down review cycles.

Teams such as Datadog’s have described a significant compression of the process: what used to take a week of briefs, mockups and review cycles now wraps up in a single conversation.

Visual briefs for social media

Instead of describing in words how a post or carousel should look, you create a visual draft directly. The creative team starts from something concrete rather than a text document, and the end result is closer to the original intention.

Landing page prototypes

If you run PPC campaigns or are testing a new offer, having a quick prototype to show the client or to use as a reference for development speeds up the whole approval cycle. You don’t need to wait for the designer to have a gap in their diary to find out whether the structure works.

Presentations and pitch decks

Claude Design generates presentations that can be exported directly to PowerPoint or sent to Canva. Useful if you need to put a deck together quickly or want a visual structure to work on before moving to the final version.

Claude Design in a marketer’s workflow

The real value doesn’t lie in any single output, but in how it changes the process.

Traditionally, the flow is: idea > written brief > wait for the designer > first version > revisions > final output. Every step costs time and communication. And every review cycle is a missed opportunity for alignment.

With Claude Design, the flow becomes: idea > instant prototype > visual alignment > handoff to the designer for the final version. The designer joins the process with a concrete reference rather than a text document, and works on something whose structure has already been approved.

It isn’t the end of the designer’s job. It’s one less round of misunderstanding.

If you’re already using Claude for the written side of your content, as in a content repurposing strategy or optimising for AI Overviews, adding Claude Design to the workflow is a natural step. The same platform, the same project context, a different output.

If you also handle marketing automation, the integration is even more direct: email templates, flow layouts, campaign visuals can all start in Claude Design before going into the automation platform.

Limits to know before you start

Claude Design is in beta. It works well for first versions, prototypes and visual briefs. It doesn’t replace Figma for anyone who needs precise control over spacing, alignment and complex component systems.

Manual editing on the canvas is still limited compared with a dedicated tool. Integrations are expanding (Adobe, Miro, Replit, Vercel and Wix are already available), but the ecosystem isn’t yet that of a mature platform.

That said, the point isn’t technical perfection. It’s the speed with which you go from idea to something visible and shareable. For the alignment and ideation phase, the tool already does what’s needed.

How to get started with Claude Design

You need a Claude Pro, Max, Team or Enterprise subscription and access to claude.ai/design. The Pro plan starts at $20 a month. Claude Design is included in the plan, with weekly usage limits separate from standard chats.

On Enterprise, the feature is turned off by default and has to be enabled by the administrator in the organisation settings.

If you’ve never used it, the most useful place to start is a brief you already have in mind. Take something you’re working on right now, a campaign, a landing page, a presentation, and start from there. The first result won’t be perfect. The second will already be a lot less imperfect.

If you want to understand how to integrate tools like this into a structured digital strategy, book a call: we’ll help you work out which processes have the most to gain from AI and where it’s still better to rely on human work.

Claude Design and AI in creative processes: where we’re heading

Claude Design isn’t an isolated case. It’s part of a broader movement in which AI enters creative processes not to replace skills, but to remove bottlenecks.

As we discussed in our article on Google AI Overviews in Italy, artificial intelligence is redefining not only how information is found, but how content is produced and distributed. Claude Design is one of the tools that makes this transformation tangible even for people who aren’t developers or designers.

The question is no longer whether to use AI in creative processes. It’s which processes really benefit and how to structure the workflow so that the end result is better, not just faster.

There’s still a lot to build on that front. But having a visual prototype in ten minutes instead of three days is already a very different starting point.