Claude Design Just Launched. Here's Your Brand Setup Guide From Scratch.
Step-by-step: how to set up your visual brand in Claude Design, even if you have zero assets, zero design background, and exactly thirty minutes.
TL;DR: Anthropic just launched Claude Design — a tool that builds your visual brand system and then creates designs with it automatically. If you have a brand ready, setup takes 30 minutes. If you don't, this post will tell you exactly what to do first. Either way: don't touch it before reading the token warning. Community brand boards, three prompts, and the honest verdict inside.
Anthropic launched Claude Design last weekend. And like any self-respecting brand strategist with a Friday night and a full token budget, I treated it like a fresco commission: I showed up, I prepped my wall, and I let Claude paint.
Thirty minutes later, I had a full visual brand system. Colors, fonts, character, vibe, locked in and applying automatically to everything I make. Impressive for a tool that launched four days ago.
The catch? It only works if you know what to give it. That’s what this post is about.
Hey, I’m Pinkie. On this corner of the internet, we build your entire visual brand system using AI, one step at a time. If you’re new here: welcome. Honestly, this might be the best time to join. start here! 🩷🦩
What you’ll learn in this post:
Which track you’re in (you have a brand or you’re only starting out) and exactly what to do based on where you’re starting from
What to upload, what to skip, and why getting this wrong will burn your tokens before Claude finishes building
How to get Claude Design to generate your brand board in one prompt — and what our community produced in their first sessions
The exact setup prompt, brand board generator prompt, and zero-brand starter prompt (paid)
Let’s set this up.
Claude Design launched April 17, 2026. It’s available to Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise subscribers. You go to claude.ai/design, upload what you have, and Claude builds your brand system before you ever touch a design.
Here’s what the setup screen looks like:
The first thing it asks: Tell us about your company and attach any design resources you have.
This is where we split into two tracks. Find yours and follow it.
Track 1: You Have a Brand. This Is a Walk in the Park.
You have some combination of: a brand guide, a logo, consistent colors, a website or Substack that actually looks like you. You’re ready. Here’s exactly what to upload:
Your brand guide PDF — even a rough one with colors, fonts, and logo
Your logo file
Your Substack or website URL
Font names and hex codes if they’re not in the guide
Here is my Brand Guide’s Imagery section. It’s a PDF I manually created in December 2025, when my brand launched.
This is the single most useful thing you can give Claude. If you don't have one yet, build your design skill first. Daria from AI Blew My Mind has an excellent breakdown of exactly how to do it: How to Create a Claude Brand Skill.
That’s it. Paste a one-sentence description of your publication into the company blurb field, add your assets, and hit go. Claude reads everything, extracts the rules, and builds your system. You’ll be in the design workspace in 30 minutes.
One thing to skip: your image library. I uploaded a small portion of mine thinking more visual context would help. It burned through my tokens before Claude finished building. Stick to the guide, the logo, the URL, and the hex codes. That’s all it needs.
Jump to “Now You’re Ready to Build” below.
If you haven't figured out your brand personality yet, that's the right place to start before you touch any design tool. I wrote the full framework in Your Brand Has a Personality. Here's How to Find It.
Track 2: You Don’t Have a Brand Yet. Don’t Skip This Part.
If you opened Claude Design and froze at the first field — you’re not behind, you’re just missing the foundation. And without it, Claude Design will give you something generic. Visually confused. Not really you.
Here’s what to gather before you touch Claude Design:
1. Write your company blurb.
Not a tagline. A description of what you do, who you’re for, and what you want to feel like visually. One specific sentence.
Weak: “I’m a content creator.” Strong: “AI Meets Girlboss: a Substack for ambitious women building personal brands with AI — visual, witty, and stylish, never corporate.”
Claude uses this to make every aesthetic decision. Don’t wing it.
2. Decide on three colors.
Primary, neutral, accent. Hex codes if you have them. A description if you don’t: “warm coral, off-white, deep teal.”
3. Name your fonts.
One for headings, one for body. If you don’t have a preference: describe the personality. “Modern and geometric for headings, clean and readable for body.”
4. Write one style sentence.
This is the step most people skip — and the one that makes the biggest difference.
Structure: “[Visual style] with a [mood] — always [what you want], never [what you don’t].”
Example: “Mixed-media fashion illustration with a handmade editorial feel — always warm and stylish, never corporate or generic.”
5. Add your Substack or website URL.
Even if you hate how it currently looks. Claude reads it for context. Context beats a blank canvas.
Still stuck?
If you went through those five steps and realized you don’t actually know your colors, your fonts, your visual character… you don’t have a brand yet. And that’s not a Claude Design problem to solve. That’s a brand strategy problem.
Claude Design is a production tool. It builds from what you know. If you don’t know your brand, it’ll build something, just not something that’s actually yours.
That’s exactly why I built the Visual Brand Blueprint with Dheeraj Sharma.
It walks you through defining your visual identity from scratch, your brand personality, color logic, typography, visual character, the style sentence, so that when you sit down in front of Claude Design, you have a real brief to hand it. Not a guess.
Do that first. Then come back here and run Track 1.
Now You’re Ready to Build with Claude Design.
Once you upload your assets, Claude gets to work. This takes around 30 minutes.
When it’s done, it presents a first version of your brand system and checks in: does this look right, or does it need refining?
Look at it critically. Check the colors, typography, overall feel. If something’s off, be specific: “The heading font feels too heavy — try something lighter.” “The accent color reads as orange, I need it more coral.”
Claude refines, then presents a second version.
Once you approve it, the system is locked in. Everything you build from this point uses your brand automatically.
Next post coming soon: the Claude Design prompt pack with 10+ prompts for layouts, landing pages, and presentations. Subscribe so you don’t miss it!
What You Can Make With It.
From inside the design workspace you can create slide decks, landing pages, one-pagers, interactive prototypes, and social graphics. You work through conversation — describe what you want, Claude builds it on the canvas, you give feedback in chat or by clicking directly on elements. It refines. You iterate.
When you’re done, export as PDF, PPTX, standalone HTML, or send directly to Canva.
And if you want to go further — hand the design off to Claude Code, and it builds you an actual live website from it. No developer. No brief lost in translation. The design becomes the spec, and the spec becomes the site.
I’m planning to build my own website in the coming months, and this is the part I’m most looking forward to. From Claude Design to a live site in one conversation. That’s not a workflow I expected to have this year.
Karo (Product with Attitude) from Product with Attitude spent 48 hours testing Claude Design from a builder’s perspective and has the full technical breakdown — including how the Claude Code handoff actually works and how fast the tokens disappear. Worth reading alongside this one.
This Is What Good Claude Design Input Produces.
Our community has been testing this since the weekend. Here’s what’s coming back.
Dr Sam Illingworth built a complete brand system for Slow AI — logo treatments, palette, typography, image styles — in 20 minutes.
In his live video this week, Sam flagged something worth noting: Claude Design looks like a precursor to native image generation inside Claude. This isn’t just a design tool — it’s Anthropic building infrastructure for something much bigger.
Mia Kiraki from ROBOTS ATE MY HOMEWORK had her brand colors locked in before she even opened it — deep teal, warm yellow, magenta. She fed them in, Claude Design matched them.
I took it a step further. Once my Claude Design system was set up, I used it to generate a brand board, an upgrade to the manual brand guide I'd been working from. I went from a scattered visual setup to a locked brand system in one session. This is how it turned out:
Clean, structured, and generated with one single prompt (I share it behind the paywall). It has the logo treatments, palette, typography, visual style, all in one place.
Now I want yours. Build your brand board and drop it in the comments, or share it as a Note and tag me. I’ll reshare what comes through.
In the comments…
Which track are you? Are your brand assets ready, or are you starting from scratch? And if you try Claude Design, we want to see your brand board, tag AI Meets Girlboss in your notes and you’ll get a restack!
You've got the setup and the workflow. What's behind the paywall are the three prompts that make it fast.
The exact prompt I used to set up my AI Meets Girlboss brand system in Claude Design
The brand board prompt that generated my Brand Guide what you just saw
And three things worth uploading when you think you have nothing.
