How Not to Let Claude Design Kill Your Design Skill

Since Claude Design launched, my LinkedIn feed has been flooded with professionals sharing their work. Email newsletter layouts, carousel posts, web images: all prompted into existence in minutes, primarily aimed at marketing collateral or brand building.

I have been thinking about what happens to the grunt work of creation: the manual art of designing, when so much of it can be bypassed with just a few keystrokes.

The pattern runs deeper than this one launch by Claude:

At each stage, the same question resurfaces: where does that leave the act of actually making something?

In last pages of The Hobbit graphic novel, illustrator David Wenzel explains his process.

He describes the different styling boards and papers he worked with. He shares about discovering pen and ink in high school, and what that discovery clarified about what line artists are capable of. He sketches the development stages of the dwarfs, noting how Tolkien designated different hood colours to distinguish each character within a crowded ensemble. What Wenzel documents is the thinking behind the illustration.

When you instruct Claude or ChatGPT to create a photo, a design, you do not get to witness the stages of its creation — No rough version or record of what was tried and abandoned. You directly arrive at the final image after a few typing.

This leaves a question worth sitting with: are we getting good at AI platforms, or are we getting good at solving the creative problem… the kind of problem that earlier required us to learn the craft without the aid of any tool?

I recall the painters who used to hang from scaffolding across Chennai, painting advertisements by hand on commercial building walls. It moved from hand-painting to printed signage on flex boards, to LED screens. The painter lost his livelihood; a business that manufactures LED screens gained one. That is how each tier of technological change has always worked: job loss on one end and job creation on the other.

The same pattern runs through digital design. Designers started with Adobe while non-designers tried MS Paint and then Canva. Now all of these tools are powered by AI to increase production efficiency and allow us to create collateral using pre-set templates. For every significant AI update, there is either a loss of skill or an outright loss of work for a designer. The designer who does not upskill with each update perhaps risks becoming the painter on the scaffolding: skilled at something the market has already moved past.

The question is not whether Claude Design or AI-amplified Canva are useful. They are.

But will you still call yourself a designer if you are an effective prompt author — providing brand color, font style, tone, and requirement — while Claude creates the collateral? To keep pace with what these platforms demand, the imperative is to understand what makes a design effective. That understanding lives in human-made, freehand craft: the kind that carries emotional weight.

There is also a more practical reason to hold on to bedrock skills because depending entirely on one platform is too risky. So when a Cloudflare outage hits AI tools globally, the professionals who can still work in Canva or Adobe at its most elementary are the ones who never let the fundamentals lapse.

At the Young India Fellowship in Ashoka University, one of our critical writing course reading was Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud: a book that explains how comics function, illustrated as a comic itself. The drawing, the icons, the caricatures, the panels, the speech bubbles: each had a distinct purpose, focused on a single question: what does it take to effectively tell a story through a comic?

I have read comics all my life, from Tinkle to Tintin to Asterix & Obelix. In those panels, I was always intrigued by how a story was told within the confines of small boxes on a page.

As we adapt to platforms such as Claude Design, the priority is to return to the first principles of illustration. The best place to do that is through fiction mediums, particularly comics, as a storytelling framework. Fiction has the power to persuade and carry a narrative far more emotionally than most visual collateral does. While it is also useful to study advertisements with strong copy and design layout, narrative art forms teach you how visual composition and imagery carry emotion.

Next time, before sitting down to create something, consider:

You will not just become a person with better taste; equally, you develop a richer appreciation of the history and context of how to brief more completely and use AI platforms with greater purpose.

There is a well-known hack for writers who want to get better at writing: sketch a map. (I had written about this earlier on a LinkedIn post). Author N.K. Jemisin has spoken about how map drawing helps her figure out what her characters want, where the story is set, and how the geography of a place shapes the people who inhabit it.

To build my own fictional universe, I have been scribbling different styles of maps in my sketchbook, using non-AI-powered instruments such as Inkarnate and Canvas of Kings to render them digitally. I have also spent several years studying how authors like Brandon Sanderson, Tolkien, and C.S. Lewis approach world-building. This has improved my writing.

Once, I sketched a map by hand, scanned it, fed the photo into Google Gemini, and explained the different marks in the sketch: the shorelines, the rivers, the hills and towns. Then I asked the platform to render it as a near-freehand illustration. The result was convincing. But the question it left behind has stayed with me: I did the slow laborious work of sketching, then gave the final product to an AI tool for enhancement.

Does that make it better? Or have I simply amplified the creation process?

I still do not have a clear answer.

And that’s all for today!

Yeah. That Arnold Schwarzenegger.

So do Codie Sanchez, Scott Galloway, Colin & Samir, Shaan Puri, and Jay Shetty. And none of them are doing it for fun. They're doing it because a list you own compounds in ways that social media never will.

beehiiv is where they built it. You can start yours for 30% off your first 3 months with code PLATFORM30. Start building today.