6 ms·

Figma's woes compound with Claude Design

122 points by martinald 6mo ago

stingraycharles 6mo ago
> Anthropic themselves launched Claude Design which is a pretty direct competitor to Figma in many ways. While it's nowhere near functional and polished enough to replace Figma's core design product, I expect it will get significant traction outside of that The reaction that designers I know have given Claude Design couldn’t be different than how Claude Code was received by software devs. It’s simply useless for designers, their workflow is very different from software devs. You can’t “oh let Claude Design come up with a quick logo for this” in the same way that Claude Code was able to quickly solve small annoyances for devs. People that think that Claude Design is going to replace Figma don’t really understand how both products relate. Claude Design empowers non-designers to make decent designs. It’s not aimed at designers. Figma will probably better integrate AI in their own offering at some point which will help designers become more productive. And that will be the end of it.
- TMWNN 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  - foolswisdom 6mo ago
    Personally, as a developer, I interact with figma to use designs made by designers. So a portion of that userbase probably isn't going anywhere?
  - rafram 6mo ago
    A very large portion of the non-design users are using it to reference/implement the designs created by their designer colleagues. They’re not going anywhere.
    - thinkindie 6mo ago
      if you export the .fig file (even programatically) and you ingest in Claude Design you won't need to create users in Figma, right?
      - rafram 6mo ago
        Sure, if your design decisions are completely one-sided and transactional. In my experience, though, being able to comment and collaborate in Figma is important, as is being able to go find specific icons and components on my own.
        thinkindie 6mo ago
        i believe it depends on the design system maturity too.
  - stingraycharles 6mo ago
    > Quoting from the article, which of course you did not read What makes you think that I didn’t read the article, but rather just disagree with it? “which of course you did not read” is such a negative/toxic statement that adds no value. obviously developers use the product to collaborate with designers. but it’s not the developers that are buying this product. they’re just stakeholders.
  - easton 6mo ago
    The developer seats are read-only, so they rely on designer seats existing to actually create files to inspect for development (and I’d guess PMs are using figma because designers are using figma). If designers still want Figma then the other people are along for the ride (unless the idea is the designers are being replaced with a PM+Claude.)
    - sublimee 6mo ago
      As a PM in a startup, it took me a while to convince my boss I’m not a designer. It’s so easy nowadays to get a Figma file with an established design system and produce new features. There are Figma plugins that let you extract a static HTML website into a Figma file. Copying that over Figma Make and prompting for a while can make pretty good prototypes that need very little adjustment back in Figma. However, I believe that being able to do something doesn’t mean you should do it. Prompting back and forth can easily introduce a lot of cognitive load on top of all sorts of other daily task. I feel the modern human in the loop is similar to the factory processing line workflow where just almost anyone can learn how to use a tool and produce output.
- kgwgk 6mo ago
  > People that think that Claude Design is going to replace Figma don’t really understand how both products relate. Claude Design empowers non-designers to make decent designs. Maybe it will replace (a large share of) Figma users.
  - sbarre 6mo ago
    Yeah this is my take too.. I know a lot of front-end developers who pay for Figma and/or are not so invested in design that they need to do it all by hand. They will gladly use something like this (many have already started experimenting with other similar products) to get them even 60% of the way there and then they can polish the rest in code... Which is basically how they used Figma before. Visualize to close enough and then iterate to final in code. If Claude Design can ingest your design system and previous examples and go further than templates and scaffolding, if it can help you brainstorm ideas and variations so you can - as the human in the loop - get to your final design faster.. Why wouldn't you do that?
- aurareturn 6mo ago
  People that think that Claude Design is going to replace Figma don’t really understand how both products relate. The entire workflow between designer --> dev hand off is going to change. I think the most effective teams will be working within Claude, not within Figma. For individual creators, this will definitely replace Figma. I bought Sketch for use as an individual creator because I wanted to create mocks before coding them. There's no way I'd make the same purchase today. Anyways, I'm sure Claude Design will incorporate some of Figma's features such as a company wide design language.
- NitpickLawyer 6mo ago
  > couldn’t be different than how Claude Code was received by software devs. It’s simply useless for designers, their workflow is very different from software devs. You can’t “oh let Claude Design come up with a quick logo for this” in the same way that Claude Code was able to quickly solve small annoyances for devs. Haha, that's exactly how cc was received initially. It's just autocomplete. It's useless. It can't even x. I tried to y and it gave me z. Over and over all over the internet this was the reaction. Then the bargaining began. Oh, it will maybe speed up some simple things. Like autocomplete on steroids. Maaaybe do some junior tasks once in a while. And so on...
  - deaux 6mo ago
    > Haha, that's exactly how cc was received initially. Haha, maybe by you. By many on HN, but HN is a bubble of its own. By plenty of others it was received very differently. Many of us had been doing agentic coding for more than a year already when Claude Code was released, because we found it valuable. We will see if such groups of professional designers also form for Claude Design or other such tools.
  - troupo 6mo ago
    It's still an autocomplete on steroids (that's what LLMs are). It still produces subpar code, with horrendous data access patterns, endless duplication of fucntionality etc. You still need a human in the loop to fix all the mistakes (unless you're Garry Tan or Steve Yegge who assume that quality is when you push hundreds of thousands of LoC per day). Same here. Oh, and Claude Code is significantly worse at generating design code than almost any other type of code.
    - coldtea 6mo ago
      >It still produces subpar code, with horrendous data access patterns, endless duplication of fucntionality etc Not really. 2024 called.
      - troupo 6mo ago
        Just because you don't look at the code, doesn't mean it doesn't produce subpar code constantly. Opus 4.7, high effort. Literally 30 minutes ago. There's a `const UNMATCHED_MARKER = "<hardcoded value>"` that we want to remove from a file. Behold (the first version was a full on AST walk for absolutely no reason whatsoever, by the way): function restoreUnmatchedSelectors(cssPath) { const cssContent = readFileSync(cssPath, "utf-8"); const marker = UNMATCHED_MARKER + " "; const count = (cssContent.match(new RegExp(escapeRegExp(marker), "g")) || []).length; if (count > 0) { writeFileSync(cssPath, cssContent.replaceAll(marker, "")); return count; } } function escapeRegExp(s) { return s.replace(/[.*+?^${}()|[\]\\]/g, "\\$&"); } Don't get me started on all the code duplications, utility functions written from scratch in every module that needs them, reading full database just to count number of records...
- tobr 6mo ago
  I tried uploading our design system. Claude Design’s environment was so limited it had to reimplement it from scratch in HTML, JS and CSS. Doing that burned through more than half the token limit. Along the way it completely changed it and made up things that don’t fit in at all, neither visually or as code. The output of making a mockup is one huge HTML file with minified CSS that just can’t be used meaningfully for anything. I guess I had expected something like Claude Code with visual tools added on top, but that’s not what this is.
  - nekooooo 6mo ago
    to be honest even if it had worked, i don't see claude design ever working as your source of truth
- ymolodtsov 6mo ago
  There are many designers. I know a bunch who basically stopped using Figma altogether and just prototype what they're working on directly in code these days. For them, Claude Design was a very interesting addition.
- nkoren 6mo ago
  As someone who does both development and design, I agree. With some caveats. At this point, Claude now writes > 99% of my code. I wasn't an enthusiastic early adopter; it took me a while to be willing to let go of the reins. But in tandem with LLMs getting better, I also began to realize that what happens inside the code is very rarely important enough for me to care about. Like, I care that it's secure, and performant where it needs to be, etc. -- but mostly I just care about its outputs. If it does what I want it to do, then how it does this doesn't really matter to me or my clients or my users. On the development side, my attention has focused to writing specifications and monitoring the correctness of the test suite, and > 99% of the time that's good enough. It's been a lesson in non-attachment to let go of lovingly crafting every single line of code, but the tradeoff in terms of productivity has absolutely been worth it. What makes this viable is the fact that there's essentially a "hidden layer" (the code) upon which Claude can operate. My clients don't actually care about the code, and within certain bounds (correctness, security, performance, extensibility, etc.) it turns out that neither do I. This gives Claude a lot of latitude to solve things in its own way, and I think that's a bit part of its effectiveness. On the other hand, with design there is no hidden layer. Every single aspect of the design is visible to the user and the customer. So the design reflects upon my work in ways that code does not. This means that the conditions which allow me to relax my grip on coding just don't exist for design. It's very difficult for me to imagine delegating design in the same way that I've become comfortable delegating coding. That said: I suspect that the use-case for Claude Design will be for applications which today receive very little design attention. There are loads of applications where design is less than an afterthought, and the product suffers terribly for it. Delegating to Claude, in those contexts, would likely be a very big win. But for applications which already have designers obsessing over every pixel, I see a very limited role for this. Figma's market is mostly the latter -- the former, by definition, is not part of the market for design tools -- so I don't see them being threatened by this for a long time.
  - petra 6mo ago
    Are there goals for an app design? can they be measured? specified? constrained? For example, in the world of e-commerce, one goal is improving conversion rate, as long as we get that and the design looks nice, that's OK.
- deleted 6mo ago
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- embedding-shape 6mo ago
  > Claude Design empowers non-designers to make decent designs. It’s not aimed at designers. There is a bunch of repetitive work in design as well, once you start working on larger projects. Yes, everything should be setup with components/reusability and what not, but just like programmers take shortcuts sometimes, so do designers, and you have to repeat the same change across many instances/files whenever you have to pay back the "technical debt". Probably Claude Design could be quite helpful in those cases, and the same goes for other domains too, same happens in video editing and 3D work, probably any creative effort has moments of dull, repetitive "do this change across X" where any automation would be of serious help to reduce that. It seems like a quite good thing to try to address with LLM tooling, still driven by actual humans.
- samiv 6mo ago
  "Claude Design empowers non-designers to make decent designs. It’s not aimed at designers." So...we can shitcan the designers and offload the work to the 10 developers still keeping the lights on?
  - stingraycharles 6mo ago
    Small startups / orgs? Definitely. But they’re not where the money comes from for Figma. Enterprise is not gonna lay off all their designers any time soon.
- arbuge 6mo ago
  > Claude Design empowers non-designers to make decent designs. It’s not aimed at designers. Well, when you put it that way, that sounds bad for designers, and, by extension, Figma. ps. I do like commas.
  - stingraycharles 6mo ago
    As a proponent of the Oxford comma, I didn’t mind those commas.
    - d1sxeyes 6mo ago
      Those are not Oxford commas, they’re parenthetical (and I like them too!)
- coldtea 6mo ago
  >You can’t “oh let Claude Design come up with a quick logo for this” in the same way that Claude Code was able to quickly solve small annoyances for devs. Sure you can, and many otherwise would-be human-designer-clients, will do exactly that. Nike might not, but 99% of the companies hiring designers are not Nike scale.
  - ehnto 6mo ago
    You are right I think, a lot of clients need a design as a practicality rather than a differentiating factor, they will be more than happy with a generic design output for next to nothing. Many companies are not really based around their web design being a big factor in their business. Some very influential companies in my area look like they last updated their website in 1998.
mmwako 6mo ago
Great take. I think the only way forward for Figma will be the good old "let's cannibalise our own product" playbook. They are actually in prime position (with one of the best brands and distributions out there) to create an AI design product that dominates the market.
strimoza 6mo ago
Used Claude Design to build the landing page for my side project (strimoza.com) over the weekend. Honestly impressive for a solo dev with no design background — got something shippable in a few hours. That said, I still ended up going back to tweak things manually. It's great for 80%, the last 20% still needs judgment. Not sure it kills Figma for teams, but for indie devs it's a game changer.
- iamsaitam 6mo ago
  If i can be forthright, it looks like any other llm slop website design. The grain effect, the extra long FAQ, the reveal animations, the bad combination of font sizes and contrast ratios.. you're better off ripping off a website that has been actually designed by someone who understands what they are doing.
- sreekanth850 6mo ago
  Did you checked it in mobile device?
- lightbulbish 6mo ago
  Please change your hero font. The extra wide style hurts reading
- sbarre 6mo ago
  The other commenter went a bit hard on their critique.. to each their own, I think your design is mostly fine except for that super squished title font (that is also sadly used on buttons).. It makes it very hard to read, and if you're counting on people scanning the page to quickly understand your offering, and then stick around, you should consider fixing that. Choose a better proportioned font to improve readability and it will make your site instantly better and easier to understand. I honestly thought the rendering was broken when I first loaded the page (I'm on an ultra-wide monitor) but then realized it was just like that.
- rafram 6mo ago
  It’s pretty hard to read on a phone, and the prose, particularly in the bullet points, has that annoying LLM-y trait of focusing way too much on implementation details ("Bunny CDN"!) rather than telling me a single reason why I'd actually want to pay for your product.
girvo 6mo ago
Claude Design into PenPot via its MCP was a really neat flow, for something generic looking anyway. With the correct prompts and it even built out reusable PenPot components and design system tokens etc
jimmypk 6mo ago
[flagged]
- xnorswap 6mo ago
  And which model did you use to generate this comment? Please use your own voice.
thinkindie 6mo ago
my 2 cents - Claude is not going after EVERY single SaaS (or maybe not yet), but after those products that are adopted by individuals that are keen at experimenting new tools (software engineers, designers etc etc). At the same time I have the feeling Claude Design is more useful to get UI context closer to Code Claude then anything (and eventually some quick prototyping), but I might be wrong. Either way, I've been trying to upload a 95MB .fig file and I get a generic error message without any information on the issue itself (is the file too big? not the right format? Tell me!)
pavlov 6mo ago
Anthropic today feels like 1990s Microsoft, when mere rumors that MS might enter yet another software vertical (publishing, CAD, 3D etc.) were enough to destroy the stock prices of current market leaders.
- try-working 6mo ago
  At the same time you have OpenAI's "no more sidequests". These labs can only expand so far horizontally. I don't believe they will go very far beyond code generation and its adjacenies.
napolux 6mo ago
I tested it yesterday. Kinda impressive, but also design output is pretty boring.
codethief 6mo ago
> A lot of their recent product development has been to enable further expansion in organisations - "Dev Mode" for developers (which now looks incredibly quaint against LLMs), […] all are about expanding their TAM out of "pure" design. I don't think this is correct. In my experience no one buys Figma because of Dev Mode only. Dev Mode just makes it easier/faster to go from an existing design to working code. So it is/was a means to increase Figma's moat, not to get new customers or users. (Devs already needed access to Figma before the introduction of Dev Mode.)
- mock-possum 6mo ago
  Yeah in my experience the ones who benefit the most from dev mode are junior Frontend devs - the ones who don’t know how to implement a pixel perfect design from static comps. Dev mode gives you a head start on the values to use for some css properties, at least, and maybe a more visual way ti experience the css vars in a design system.
StrangeSound 6mo ago
It's funny to see all of these dramatic articles coming out about Claude Design, when Google's Stitch[0] has been around for at least 6 months and no one has batted an eye. https://stitch.withgoogle.com/ https://stitch.withgoogle.com/ I'm not sure how much of that is overhyping Claude, or Google's poor marketing of their own products.
- swingboy 6mo ago
  On an iPhone, when I scroll down a bit to the templates and start pressing the right arrow to scroll through, the templates quickly shift off-center. Not a good look.
  - StrangeSound 6mo ago
    Yeah it's not a great experience on mobile. On desktop it works really well.
- edwinjm 6mo ago
  Don’t forget Pencil, another “Figma killer”. Free (for now). https://trypencil.com/ https://trypencil.com/
  - mmcclure 6mo ago
    I was extremely confused before realizing I think that link is for the wrong Pencil. You probably meant to reference this one: https://www.pencil.dev/ https://www.pencil.dev/
- deleted 6mo ago
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owenthejumper 6mo ago
While a big fan of Claude's models, I am starting to worry about the "winner takes all" game starting to play out in the open. With free inference to them (as pointed out in the article), why won't Anthropic build significantly more products related to software development, and kill all other competitors? Developers first, Designers next, would some kind of a clone of Jira / Monday / Asana be next?
- woeirua 6mo ago
  Now you’re starting to get why Anthropic/OpenAI aren’t worried about their margins. They can just clone a bunch of valuable existing software along the way and capture big pieces of those markets too. All they have to do is hold back a super capable model like Mythos while using it to clone your entire product. There’s nothing Figma, Salesforce, Workday, etc could do.
- finolex1 6mo ago
  Forget AI, Google/Microsoft/Amazon could all in theory have built a clone of Jira/Figma/<x> tool by now. But large companies lack the focus and commitment needed to build true competitors to these products, especially if it's not a big enough market to make a real difference to their bottom line. Perhaps this will change soon if AI models reach the "army of geniuses in a datacenter" level, but current models are a far cry from just being able to clone Jira or Asana.
jmull 6mo ago
Not sure Claude Design really competes with Figma. While it has a strong potential to let people iterate on using a design without the nuts and bolts of going back and forth with a designer, CD operates at the "leaf-node" level, where the output is generated. However, a lot of design has a deeper life-cycle than that. There's the collaboration, pitching, review, iteration, asset management, etc. In fact, the first step for using CD is "onboarding", where it sucks up a design system from your existing assets/resources. It presumes you already have a design. As it stands now, CD is one way... existing design -> task specific resources. This could be very useful, but only touches on a part of what a complete design tool does. But for iteration it's not so great. E.g. task specific concerns don't have a way to feed back to the originating design. Changes to the originating design don't have a direct path to feed back to the task specific output (e.g., when a logo or branding focus changes, or maybe just spacing guidelines are updated, the ad hoc processes around CD will have to be repeated if the changes are to actually land.) I'd think AI design integrated with Figma is in a much better position to address these more complicated scenarios. I doubt Claude Design even cares about these deeper scenarios, BTW -- it's intended as a leaf-node tool. Just pointing out it's not about to replace Figma or other more comprehensive design tools.
- coldtea 6mo ago
  >However, a lot of design has a deeper life-cycle than that. There's the collaboration, pitching, review, iteration, asset management, etc. If corners can be cut, they will. All those steps would be flatened to something like CD and a couple of side tools. Companies did "collaboration, pitching, review, iteration" because they had a designer in the loop anyway for the actual final work. Now that they don't have to, how many will just skip those steps, and if it means the end product gets less intented and "defined", they'd be fine with that?
  - girvo 6mo ago
    Exactly the same thing as coding, where “we don’t want to lower the quality bar” platitudes are repeated, while in actual fact that’s exactly what they want from us with AI output, consequences be damned. The stock market will reward us for the short term play.
woeirua 6mo ago
I think Figma is cooked. Not because they can’t eventually compete but because they’re just too slow. A company of 2500 can get outmaneuvered now by a team of 5 agentic engineers. To compete Figma would have to tear down all their internal bureaucracy ans process. Will they do that! Probably not. And wait it gets even worse! Why? - Figma is sending Anthropic a bunch of training data from its own LLM assisted data. As much as Anthropic claims that it won’t use it, we all know what Amazon did with third party sellers. - Anthropic hasn’t started to play hardball yet. Why wouldn’t they just hold back a model like Mythos (or better) while they use it to gut a few SaaS companies? It’s an easy way to increase their revenue!
- nekooooo 6mo ago
  "A company of 2500 can get outmaneuvered now by a team of 5 agentic engineers." What on earth does this even mean and how does it relate to design?
omega3 6mo ago
I don't have much experience with Figma but looking at their prices I'd think that for someone who isn't doing a one off designs Claude Design would be much more expensive (especially if not on subscriptions) https://www.figma.com/pricing/ https://www.figma.com/pricing/
- npinsker 6mo ago
  Assuming you need more than Figma's free tier, they're both $20/mo for individuals and small teams.
JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
> takeover attempt by Adobe, that was later blocked on competition grounds Would Figma in Adobe be a stronger competitor against Claude Design today than Figma and Adobe can be separately?
october8140 6mo ago
I’ve tried it. It’s useless.
NikolaosC 6mo ago
Only 33% of Figma's users are designers. 30% are devs, 37% are PMs and execs. That's their growth story and now their liability. The non-designers who made Figma huge are exactly who Claude Design and friends can peel off first.
- claw-el 6mo ago
  Yes, low-end disruption can totally disrupt a company’s revenue source and therefore its ability to continue to innovate and sustain its valuation… Claude Design doesn’t even need to be better than Figma, it just needs to be able to take some of its customers away.
nekooooo 6mo ago
people who aren't designers and don't understand design should not be writing about Figma being dead - they don't even understand that design is NOT outputs.
- dgellow 6mo ago
  Mind expanding on this? I’m not a designer and that sounds interesting
  - kingkongjaffa 6mo ago
    This book is a good read for anyone building anything, software, hardware, whatever: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things Design is its own thing. Fundamentally it's problem solving, but design is thinking about the user of the 'designed' thing and how will they use it, what will they do with it, what will it enable them to do, how will they learn how to use it, how can it be ergonomic to the environment it will be used in and the user. A lot of people can conceptualise a factory making widgets or a programmer writing code, but drastically few people really see the design process: sketches on paper, wireframes in figma, design as a solution to a problem, design as story telling, or aesthetics. But those outputs are not the point. The output of a few hours in figma is not really the images of a website made, it's more about communication or articulation of the the problem being solved and the solution that will solve it. Which is why it doesn't really matter about the tool, design is an expression, the medium whether it's a sketch or a figma mock up or a vibe-designed UI in claude design is less critical than the thought that went into it.
  - edu 6mo ago
    Not the OP, but here are my 2 CT’s on what is design: Design is the process to you follow to solve a given problem/need/desire balancing the user needs with the business/tech constraints. The output could be a a digital UI, a physical object or an intangible process. But often people think about design just as the aesthetics of a product. A common pattern is the Empathize (Research, Diverge), Define (Converge), Ideate (Diverge), Prototype (Converge), Test (and then iterate). The main benefits come from the divergent phases: empathize and ideate. But it’s far too common already that some executive has an “illumination” of how something should be and just wants to build as is, without any research or validation. They can use Claude Design (and similar) to just build a prototype of their first idea, skipping all the design process and end with something that looks good but doesn’t solve the problem adequately or fits the actual user needs/context. Of course, LLMs are useful tools that can be used in the right way: to build better prototypes in less time, to synthesize research insights, to explore ideas…
rcleveng 6mo ago
I tried out claude design yesterday and I have to say, it's exactly what I thought (hoped?) Figma Make was going to be. I didn't want yet another lovable.dev or v0 with figma make, I wanted the prompt -> figma design which I could iterate on by hand once I got something in place (and also faster route to creating the prototype in figma) to play with the UX of it.
manofshad 6mo ago
Isn’t a huge part of Figma the shared component libraries and design systems? It’s less about drawing UIs and more about keeping products consistent across teams within the company.
kashkovv 6mo ago
I feel the real concern for tools like Figma is that Web is moving towards agentic headless architectures.
plastic041 6mo ago
It's a little unfair to Figma when its moralless competitor is ignoring every copyright laws.
kordlessagain 6mo ago
TIL there's going to be a SaaSpocalypse.
- namanyayg 6mo ago
  About time, I'd say
lebeddimaaaa 6mo ago
[dead]

122 points by martinald 6mo ago

> Anthropic themselves launched Claude Design which is a pretty direct competitor to Figma in many ways. While it's nowhere near functional and polished enough to replace Figma's core design product, I expect it will get significant traction outside of that The reaction that designers I know have given Claude Design couldn’t be different than how Claude Code was received by software devs. It’s simply useless for designers, their workflow is very different from software devs. You can’t “oh let Claude Design come up with a quick logo for this” in the same way that Claude Code was able to quickly solve small annoyances for devs. People that think that Claude Design is going to replace Figma don’t really understand how both products relate. Claude Design empowers non-designers to make decent designs. It’s not aimed at designers. Figma will probably better integrate AI in their own offering at some point which will help designers become more productive. And that will be the end of it.

TMWNN 6mo ago
[flagged]
- foolswisdom 6mo ago
  Personally, as a developer, I interact with figma to use designs made by designers. So a portion of that userbase probably isn't going anywhere?
- rafram 6mo ago
  A very large portion of the non-design users are using it to reference/implement the designs created by their designer colleagues. They’re not going anywhere.
  - thinkindie 6mo ago
    if you export the .fig file (even programatically) and you ingest in Claude Design you won't need to create users in Figma, right?
    - rafram 6mo ago
      Sure, if your design decisions are completely one-sided and transactional. In my experience, though, being able to comment and collaborate in Figma is important, as is being able to go find specific icons and components on my own.
      - thinkindie 6mo ago
        i believe it depends on the design system maturity too.
- stingraycharles 6mo ago
  > Quoting from the article, which of course you did not read What makes you think that I didn’t read the article, but rather just disagree with it? “which of course you did not read” is such a negative/toxic statement that adds no value. obviously developers use the product to collaborate with designers. but it’s not the developers that are buying this product. they’re just stakeholders.
- easton 6mo ago
  The developer seats are read-only, so they rely on designer seats existing to actually create files to inspect for development (and I’d guess PMs are using figma because designers are using figma). If designers still want Figma then the other people are along for the ride (unless the idea is the designers are being replaced with a PM+Claude.)
  - sublimee 6mo ago
    As a PM in a startup, it took me a while to convince my boss I’m not a designer. It’s so easy nowadays to get a Figma file with an established design system and produce new features. There are Figma plugins that let you extract a static HTML website into a Figma file. Copying that over Figma Make and prompting for a while can make pretty good prototypes that need very little adjustment back in Figma. However, I believe that being able to do something doesn’t mean you should do it. Prompting back and forth can easily introduce a lot of cognitive load on top of all sorts of other daily task. I feel the modern human in the loop is similar to the factory processing line workflow where just almost anyone can learn how to use a tool and produce output.
kgwgk 6mo ago
> People that think that Claude Design is going to replace Figma don’t really understand how both products relate. Claude Design empowers non-designers to make decent designs. Maybe it will replace (a large share of) Figma users.
- sbarre 6mo ago
  Yeah this is my take too.. I know a lot of front-end developers who pay for Figma and/or are not so invested in design that they need to do it all by hand. They will gladly use something like this (many have already started experimenting with other similar products) to get them even 60% of the way there and then they can polish the rest in code... Which is basically how they used Figma before. Visualize to close enough and then iterate to final in code. If Claude Design can ingest your design system and previous examples and go further than templates and scaffolding, if it can help you brainstorm ideas and variations so you can - as the human in the loop - get to your final design faster.. Why wouldn't you do that?
aurareturn 6mo ago
People that think that Claude Design is going to replace Figma don’t really understand how both products relate. The entire workflow between designer --> dev hand off is going to change. I think the most effective teams will be working within Claude, not within Figma. For individual creators, this will definitely replace Figma. I bought Sketch for use as an individual creator because I wanted to create mocks before coding them. There's no way I'd make the same purchase today. Anyways, I'm sure Claude Design will incorporate some of Figma's features such as a company wide design language.
NitpickLawyer 6mo ago
> couldn’t be different than how Claude Code was received by software devs. It’s simply useless for designers, their workflow is very different from software devs. You can’t “oh let Claude Design come up with a quick logo for this” in the same way that Claude Code was able to quickly solve small annoyances for devs. Haha, that's exactly how cc was received initially. It's just autocomplete. It's useless. It can't even x. I tried to y and it gave me z. Over and over all over the internet this was the reaction. Then the bargaining began. Oh, it will maybe speed up some simple things. Like autocomplete on steroids. Maaaybe do some junior tasks once in a while. And so on...
- deaux 6mo ago
  > Haha, that's exactly how cc was received initially. Haha, maybe by you. By many on HN, but HN is a bubble of its own. By plenty of others it was received very differently. Many of us had been doing agentic coding for more than a year already when Claude Code was released, because we found it valuable. We will see if such groups of professional designers also form for Claude Design or other such tools.
- troupo 6mo ago
  It's still an autocomplete on steroids (that's what LLMs are). It still produces subpar code, with horrendous data access patterns, endless duplication of fucntionality etc. You still need a human in the loop to fix all the mistakes (unless you're Garry Tan or Steve Yegge who assume that quality is when you push hundreds of thousands of LoC per day). Same here. Oh, and Claude Code is significantly worse at generating design code than almost any other type of code.
  - coldtea 6mo ago
    >It still produces subpar code, with horrendous data access patterns, endless duplication of fucntionality etc Not really. 2024 called.
    - troupo 6mo ago
      Just because you don't look at the code, doesn't mean it doesn't produce subpar code constantly. Opus 4.7, high effort. Literally 30 minutes ago. There's a `const UNMATCHED_MARKER = "<hardcoded value>"` that we want to remove from a file. Behold (the first version was a full on AST walk for absolutely no reason whatsoever, by the way): function restoreUnmatchedSelectors(cssPath) { const cssContent = readFileSync(cssPath, "utf-8"); const marker = UNMATCHED_MARKER + " "; const count = (cssContent.match(new RegExp(escapeRegExp(marker), "g")) || []).length; if (count > 0) { writeFileSync(cssPath, cssContent.replaceAll(marker, "")); return count; } } function escapeRegExp(s) { return s.replace(/[.*+?^${}()|[\]\\]/g, "\\$&"); } Don't get me started on all the code duplications, utility functions written from scratch in every module that needs them, reading full database just to count number of records...
tobr 6mo ago
I tried uploading our design system. Claude Design’s environment was so limited it had to reimplement it from scratch in HTML, JS and CSS. Doing that burned through more than half the token limit. Along the way it completely changed it and made up things that don’t fit in at all, neither visually or as code. The output of making a mockup is one huge HTML file with minified CSS that just can’t be used meaningfully for anything. I guess I had expected something like Claude Code with visual tools added on top, but that’s not what this is.
- nekooooo 6mo ago
  to be honest even if it had worked, i don't see claude design ever working as your source of truth
ymolodtsov 6mo ago
There are many designers. I know a bunch who basically stopped using Figma altogether and just prototype what they're working on directly in code these days. For them, Claude Design was a very interesting addition.
nkoren 6mo ago
As someone who does both development and design, I agree. With some caveats. At this point, Claude now writes > 99% of my code. I wasn't an enthusiastic early adopter; it took me a while to be willing to let go of the reins. But in tandem with LLMs getting better, I also began to realize that what happens inside the code is very rarely important enough for me to care about. Like, I care that it's secure, and performant where it needs to be, etc. -- but mostly I just care about its outputs. If it does what I want it to do, then how it does this doesn't really matter to me or my clients or my users. On the development side, my attention has focused to writing specifications and monitoring the correctness of the test suite, and > 99% of the time that's good enough. It's been a lesson in non-attachment to let go of lovingly crafting every single line of code, but the tradeoff in terms of productivity has absolutely been worth it. What makes this viable is the fact that there's essentially a "hidden layer" (the code) upon which Claude can operate. My clients don't actually care about the code, and within certain bounds (correctness, security, performance, extensibility, etc.) it turns out that neither do I. This gives Claude a lot of latitude to solve things in its own way, and I think that's a bit part of its effectiveness. On the other hand, with design there is no hidden layer. Every single aspect of the design is visible to the user and the customer. So the design reflects upon my work in ways that code does not. This means that the conditions which allow me to relax my grip on coding just don't exist for design. It's very difficult for me to imagine delegating design in the same way that I've become comfortable delegating coding. That said: I suspect that the use-case for Claude Design will be for applications which today receive very little design attention. There are loads of applications where design is less than an afterthought, and the product suffers terribly for it. Delegating to Claude, in those contexts, would likely be a very big win. But for applications which already have designers obsessing over every pixel, I see a very limited role for this. Figma's market is mostly the latter -- the former, by definition, is not part of the market for design tools -- so I don't see them being threatened by this for a long time.
- petra 6mo ago
  Are there goals for an app design? can they be measured? specified? constrained? For example, in the world of e-commerce, one goal is improving conversion rate, as long as we get that and the design looks nice, that's OK.
deleted 6mo ago
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embedding-shape 6mo ago
> Claude Design empowers non-designers to make decent designs. It’s not aimed at designers. There is a bunch of repetitive work in design as well, once you start working on larger projects. Yes, everything should be setup with components/reusability and what not, but just like programmers take shortcuts sometimes, so do designers, and you have to repeat the same change across many instances/files whenever you have to pay back the "technical debt". Probably Claude Design could be quite helpful in those cases, and the same goes for other domains too, same happens in video editing and 3D work, probably any creative effort has moments of dull, repetitive "do this change across X" where any automation would be of serious help to reduce that. It seems like a quite good thing to try to address with LLM tooling, still driven by actual humans.
samiv 6mo ago
"Claude Design empowers non-designers to make decent designs. It’s not aimed at designers." So...we can shitcan the designers and offload the work to the 10 developers still keeping the lights on?
- stingraycharles 6mo ago
  Small startups / orgs? Definitely. But they’re not where the money comes from for Figma. Enterprise is not gonna lay off all their designers any time soon.
arbuge 6mo ago
> Claude Design empowers non-designers to make decent designs. It’s not aimed at designers. Well, when you put it that way, that sounds bad for designers, and, by extension, Figma. ps. I do like commas.
- stingraycharles 6mo ago
  As a proponent of the Oxford comma, I didn’t mind those commas.
  - d1sxeyes 6mo ago
    Those are not Oxford commas, they’re parenthetical (and I like them too!)
coldtea 6mo ago
>You can’t “oh let Claude Design come up with a quick logo for this” in the same way that Claude Code was able to quickly solve small annoyances for devs. Sure you can, and many otherwise would-be human-designer-clients, will do exactly that. Nike might not, but 99% of the companies hiring designers are not Nike scale.
- ehnto 6mo ago
  You are right I think, a lot of clients need a design as a practicality rather than a differentiating factor, they will be more than happy with a generic design output for next to nothing. Many companies are not really based around their web design being a big factor in their business. Some very influential companies in my area look like they last updated their website in 1998.

mmwako 6mo ago

Great take. I think the only way forward for Figma will be the good old "let's cannibalise our own product" playbook. They are actually in prime position (with one of the best brands and distributions out there) to create an AI design product that dominates the market.

strimoza 6mo ago

Used Claude Design to build the landing page for my side project (strimoza.com) over the weekend. Honestly impressive for a solo dev with no design background — got something shippable in a few hours. That said, I still ended up going back to tweak things manually. It's great for 80%, the last 20% still needs judgment. Not sure it kills Figma for teams, but for indie devs it's a game changer.

iamsaitam 6mo ago
If i can be forthright, it looks like any other llm slop website design. The grain effect, the extra long FAQ, the reveal animations, the bad combination of font sizes and contrast ratios.. you're better off ripping off a website that has been actually designed by someone who understands what they are doing.
sreekanth850 6mo ago
Did you checked it in mobile device?
lightbulbish 6mo ago
Please change your hero font. The extra wide style hurts reading
sbarre 6mo ago
The other commenter went a bit hard on their critique.. to each their own, I think your design is mostly fine except for that super squished title font (that is also sadly used on buttons).. It makes it very hard to read, and if you're counting on people scanning the page to quickly understand your offering, and then stick around, you should consider fixing that. Choose a better proportioned font to improve readability and it will make your site instantly better and easier to understand. I honestly thought the rendering was broken when I first loaded the page (I'm on an ultra-wide monitor) but then realized it was just like that.
rafram 6mo ago
It’s pretty hard to read on a phone, and the prose, particularly in the bullet points, has that annoying LLM-y trait of focusing way too much on implementation details ("Bunny CDN"!) rather than telling me a single reason why I'd actually want to pay for your product.

girvo 6mo ago

Claude Design into PenPot via its MCP was a really neat flow, for something generic looking anyway. With the correct prompts and it even built out reusable PenPot components and design system tokens etc

jimmypk 6mo ago

[flagged]

xnorswap 6mo ago
And which model did you use to generate this comment? Please use your own voice.

thinkindie 6mo ago

my 2 cents - Claude is not going after EVERY single SaaS (or maybe not yet), but after those products that are adopted by individuals that are keen at experimenting new tools (software engineers, designers etc etc). At the same time I have the feeling Claude Design is more useful to get UI context closer to Code Claude then anything (and eventually some quick prototyping), but I might be wrong. Either way, I've been trying to upload a 95MB .fig file and I get a generic error message without any information on the issue itself (is the file too big? not the right format? Tell me!)

pavlov 6mo ago

Anthropic today feels like 1990s Microsoft, when mere rumors that MS might enter yet another software vertical (publishing, CAD, 3D etc.) were enough to destroy the stock prices of current market leaders.

try-working 6mo ago
At the same time you have OpenAI's "no more sidequests". These labs can only expand so far horizontally. I don't believe they will go very far beyond code generation and its adjacenies.

napolux 6mo ago

I tested it yesterday. Kinda impressive, but also design output is pretty boring.

codethief 6mo ago

> A lot of their recent product development has been to enable further expansion in organisations - "Dev Mode" for developers (which now looks incredibly quaint against LLMs), […] all are about expanding their TAM out of "pure" design. I don't think this is correct. In my experience no one buys Figma because of Dev Mode only. Dev Mode just makes it easier/faster to go from an existing design to working code. So it is/was a means to increase Figma's moat, not to get new customers or users. (Devs already needed access to Figma before the introduction of Dev Mode.)

mock-possum 6mo ago
Yeah in my experience the ones who benefit the most from dev mode are junior Frontend devs - the ones who don’t know how to implement a pixel perfect design from static comps. Dev mode gives you a head start on the values to use for some css properties, at least, and maybe a more visual way ti experience the css vars in a design system.

StrangeSound 6mo ago

It's funny to see all of these dramatic articles coming out about Claude Design, when Google's Stitch[0] has been around for at least 6 months and no one has batted an eye. https://stitch.withgoogle.com/ https://stitch.withgoogle.com/ I'm not sure how much of that is overhyping Claude, or Google's poor marketing of their own products.

swingboy 6mo ago
On an iPhone, when I scroll down a bit to the templates and start pressing the right arrow to scroll through, the templates quickly shift off-center. Not a good look.
- StrangeSound 6mo ago
  Yeah it's not a great experience on mobile. On desktop it works really well.
edwinjm 6mo ago
Don’t forget Pencil, another “Figma killer”. Free (for now). https://trypencil.com/ https://trypencil.com/
- mmcclure 6mo ago
  I was extremely confused before realizing I think that link is for the wrong Pencil. You probably meant to reference this one: https://www.pencil.dev/ https://www.pencil.dev/
deleted 6mo ago
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owenthejumper 6mo ago

While a big fan of Claude's models, I am starting to worry about the "winner takes all" game starting to play out in the open. With free inference to them (as pointed out in the article), why won't Anthropic build significantly more products related to software development, and kill all other competitors? Developers first, Designers next, would some kind of a clone of Jira / Monday / Asana be next?

woeirua 6mo ago
Now you’re starting to get why Anthropic/OpenAI aren’t worried about their margins. They can just clone a bunch of valuable existing software along the way and capture big pieces of those markets too. All they have to do is hold back a super capable model like Mythos while using it to clone your entire product. There’s nothing Figma, Salesforce, Workday, etc could do.
finolex1 6mo ago
Forget AI, Google/Microsoft/Amazon could all in theory have built a clone of Jira/Figma/<x> tool by now. But large companies lack the focus and commitment needed to build true competitors to these products, especially if it's not a big enough market to make a real difference to their bottom line. Perhaps this will change soon if AI models reach the "army of geniuses in a datacenter" level, but current models are a far cry from just being able to clone Jira or Asana.

jmull 6mo ago

Not sure Claude Design really competes with Figma. While it has a strong potential to let people iterate on using a design without the nuts and bolts of going back and forth with a designer, CD operates at the "leaf-node" level, where the output is generated. However, a lot of design has a deeper life-cycle than that. There's the collaboration, pitching, review, iteration, asset management, etc. In fact, the first step for using CD is "onboarding", where it sucks up a design system from your existing assets/resources. It presumes you already have a design. As it stands now, CD is one way... existing design -> task specific resources. This could be very useful, but only touches on a part of what a complete design tool does. But for iteration it's not so great. E.g. task specific concerns don't have a way to feed back to the originating design. Changes to the originating design don't have a direct path to feed back to the task specific output (e.g., when a logo or branding focus changes, or maybe just spacing guidelines are updated, the ad hoc processes around CD will have to be repeated if the changes are to actually land.) I'd think AI design integrated with Figma is in a much better position to address these more complicated scenarios. I doubt Claude Design even cares about these deeper scenarios, BTW -- it's intended as a leaf-node tool. Just pointing out it's not about to replace Figma or other more comprehensive design tools.

coldtea 6mo ago
>However, a lot of design has a deeper life-cycle than that. There's the collaboration, pitching, review, iteration, asset management, etc. If corners can be cut, they will. All those steps would be flatened to something like CD and a couple of side tools. Companies did "collaboration, pitching, review, iteration" because they had a designer in the loop anyway for the actual final work. Now that they don't have to, how many will just skip those steps, and if it means the end product gets less intented and "defined", they'd be fine with that?
- girvo 6mo ago
  Exactly the same thing as coding, where “we don’t want to lower the quality bar” platitudes are repeated, while in actual fact that’s exactly what they want from us with AI output, consequences be damned. The stock market will reward us for the short term play.

woeirua 6mo ago

I think Figma is cooked. Not because they can’t eventually compete but because they’re just too slow. A company of 2500 can get outmaneuvered now by a team of 5 agentic engineers. To compete Figma would have to tear down all their internal bureaucracy ans process. Will they do that! Probably not. And wait it gets even worse! Why? - Figma is sending Anthropic a bunch of training data from its own LLM assisted data. As much as Anthropic claims that it won’t use it, we all know what Amazon did with third party sellers. - Anthropic hasn’t started to play hardball yet. Why wouldn’t they just hold back a model like Mythos (or better) while they use it to gut a few SaaS companies? It’s an easy way to increase their revenue!

nekooooo 6mo ago
"A company of 2500 can get outmaneuvered now by a team of 5 agentic engineers." What on earth does this even mean and how does it relate to design?

omega3 6mo ago

I don't have much experience with Figma but looking at their prices I'd think that for someone who isn't doing a one off designs Claude Design would be much more expensive (especially if not on subscriptions) https://www.figma.com/pricing/ https://www.figma.com/pricing/

npinsker 6mo ago
Assuming you need more than Figma's free tier, they're both $20/mo for individuals and small teams.

JumpCrisscross 6mo ago

> takeover attempt by Adobe, that was later blocked on competition grounds Would Figma in Adobe be a stronger competitor against Claude Design today than Figma and Adobe can be separately?

october8140 6mo ago

I’ve tried it. It’s useless.

NikolaosC 6mo ago

Only 33% of Figma's users are designers. 30% are devs, 37% are PMs and execs. That's their growth story and now their liability. The non-designers who made Figma huge are exactly who Claude Design and friends can peel off first.

claw-el 6mo ago
Yes, low-end disruption can totally disrupt a company’s revenue source and therefore its ability to continue to innovate and sustain its valuation… Claude Design doesn’t even need to be better than Figma, it just needs to be able to take some of its customers away.

nekooooo 6mo ago

people who aren't designers and don't understand design should not be writing about Figma being dead - they don't even understand that design is NOT outputs.

dgellow 6mo ago
Mind expanding on this? I’m not a designer and that sounds interesting
- kingkongjaffa 6mo ago
  This book is a good read for anyone building anything, software, hardware, whatever: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things Design is its own thing. Fundamentally it's problem solving, but design is thinking about the user of the 'designed' thing and how will they use it, what will they do with it, what will it enable them to do, how will they learn how to use it, how can it be ergonomic to the environment it will be used in and the user. A lot of people can conceptualise a factory making widgets or a programmer writing code, but drastically few people really see the design process: sketches on paper, wireframes in figma, design as a solution to a problem, design as story telling, or aesthetics. But those outputs are not the point. The output of a few hours in figma is not really the images of a website made, it's more about communication or articulation of the the problem being solved and the solution that will solve it. Which is why it doesn't really matter about the tool, design is an expression, the medium whether it's a sketch or a figma mock up or a vibe-designed UI in claude design is less critical than the thought that went into it.
- edu 6mo ago
  Not the OP, but here are my 2 CT’s on what is design: Design is the process to you follow to solve a given problem/need/desire balancing the user needs with the business/tech constraints. The output could be a a digital UI, a physical object or an intangible process. But often people think about design just as the aesthetics of a product. A common pattern is the Empathize (Research, Diverge), Define (Converge), Ideate (Diverge), Prototype (Converge), Test (and then iterate). The main benefits come from the divergent phases: empathize and ideate. But it’s far too common already that some executive has an “illumination” of how something should be and just wants to build as is, without any research or validation. They can use Claude Design (and similar) to just build a prototype of their first idea, skipping all the design process and end with something that looks good but doesn’t solve the problem adequately or fits the actual user needs/context. Of course, LLMs are useful tools that can be used in the right way: to build better prototypes in less time, to synthesize research insights, to explore ideas…

rcleveng 6mo ago

I tried out claude design yesterday and I have to say, it's exactly what I thought (hoped?) Figma Make was going to be. I didn't want yet another lovable.dev or v0 with figma make, I wanted the prompt -> figma design which I could iterate on by hand once I got something in place (and also faster route to creating the prototype in figma) to play with the UX of it.

manofshad 6mo ago

Isn’t a huge part of Figma the shared component libraries and design systems? It’s less about drawing UIs and more about keeping products consistent across teams within the company.

kashkovv 6mo ago

I feel the real concern for tools like Figma is that Web is moving towards agentic headless architectures.

plastic041 6mo ago

It's a little unfair to Figma when its moralless competitor is ignoring every copyright laws.

kordlessagain 6mo ago

TIL there's going to be a SaaSpocalypse.

namanyayg 6mo ago
About time, I'd say

lebeddimaaaa 6mo ago

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