Upload first, then decide.
Put your brand into Claude Design in an afternoon. You upload what you already have, Claude Design shows you your brand as it is today, and you make the decisions one by one by looking at options side by side. No design skills, no code, no rules to write.
Read this first. Then take one move at a time.
Claude Design is in beta on Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise plans, at claude.ai/design. Your progress on this page is remembered in your browser.
Most brand books describe. "Use the accent sparingly." "Keep the tone confident but warm." A person can argue about what that means, and an AI will simply guess. Guessing is where drift starts: the third version of the logo, the proposal that looks nothing like the website, the deck rebuilt because nobody knew which blue was right.
A decision is different: this blue and no other, this logo file and the rest retired, this typeface for headings and that one for text. You do not have to write any of it. Claude Design will show you what it found in your files, and you say which one stays. Choosing is the whole skill this page asks of you.
Ten decisions is where a small brand starts, not where it ends. Our own system carries twenty-eight after three months, and most of the later ones are refinements a growing company adds as it goes. Start with ten. Add one whenever a real question comes up twice.
Gather what you already have
Collect these into one folder. Do not tidy them. The mess is information, because Claude Design will find the contradictions for you.
- Your logo files, every version you can find, including the ones you wish did not exist.
- The brand book or style guide, if there is one, as a PDF.
- Screenshots of your website: the home page and one inner page, full length.
- The last three sales decks that actually went to a customer, as PDF.
- One recent one-pager, proposal or brochure.
- Your fonts, if you have the files. If not, skip this. Claude Design reads the names from your documents.
Pick the truest one
Which of those documents is the truest version of your brand today? Usually it is the website. Sometimes it is one deck the founder made personally. Whichever it is, that document breaks every tie, and you will say so in one sentence in the next move.
Create the design system and upload everything
Open claude.ai/design. Below the "What should we create?" box, click the Design systems tab, then Create design system.
Choose Create here. The second option is for teams with a code component library and is not for this afternoon.
The setup form appears. Fill it in this order.
- Company name and blurb. Your company name, then one line on what you do and who you sell to. Plain words.
- Add fonts, logos and assets. Drag the whole folder here: logos, brand book, decks, website screenshots, fonts. Everything from move 1.
- Any other notes. Two sentences, and this is the most important field on the page. Replace "website" with whichever document you picked in move 2.
Skip the GitHub and Figma fields unless you have them. Click Continue to generation and wait a few minutes.
Let it read
Claude Design generates a first version of your brand system and opens it as a page with a menu on the left: your brand and logos, colours, components, spacing, type, and a readme that explains what it found and where.
Read the readme first. It tells you which files it used, what it treated as the reference, and what it had to guess. Then walk the menu from top to bottom. Nothing here is final. Expect to see things you did not know: four blues, two logo versions, three ways of writing the company name. That list is the reason your assets drift, and the next move fixes it.
Decide one section at a time, by looking
Nothing here is typed as a rule. You look at what Claude Design shows you and you answer. There are two ways to do that, and you will use both.
Scroll the design system page. Under the readme, every section of your brand is a card: photography, logo, mark on backgrounds, voice, each colour, each component. Each card has a Feedback button. Press it and say what stays and what goes, in plain words: "keep the 2019 lockup, retire the other two", "this teal, not the darker one". Claude Design records it and updates the system. For most of the ten decisions this is all you need.
When you cannot judge from one card, paste the prompt for that decision into the chat box at the bottom left. Claude Design answers with a decision card: the options as thumbnails, labelled, with a short reason under each. Click the one you want and press Send answer. Avoid "Decide for me": that hands the decision to the AI, which is the one thing it should not make.
Paste the prompts in order, wait for the previews, answer with a letter or a click. When a decision is made, tick it and write the outcome in your own words in the field under the prompt: which option you picked and what was retired. That field is your record, nothing else reads it. Your ticks and notes stay in this browser, and the button at the end copies the whole list so you can paste it into an email or the readme.
Ask to see: every logo version found, side by side, with the file each came from. Decide: the one primary mark. The rest are retired by name.
Ask to see: the chosen mark on white, on black, on your main colour. Decide: which version goes on which background.
Ask to see: each candidate colour on the same one-pager, one version per colour. Decide: one main colour and its supporting tints.
Ask to see: the same page with the accent used once, on all buttons, and as a background. Decide: whether you have an accent and how much of it is allowed.
Ask to see: two or three pairings of heading and text typefaces on the same slide. Decide: one heading face, one text face.
Ask to see: buttons and cards with square, softly rounded and fully rounded corners. Decide: one corner style, shadow or none.
Ask to see: three image styles applied to the same hero. Decide: what photographs or illustrations are allowed.
Ask to see: the same three sentences written in two tones. Decide: the tone, the spelling convention, three words never to use.
Ask to see: a footer with contact details, company name, legal line and page numbers. Decide: what appears on every page, and how the company name is written.
Nothing to see. Write one name. Decide: the one person who rules on anything not covered, and that changes are made only here.
That is your brand as decisions. You did not write a line of it.
Test on something small
At the top of the design system page, click New design under "Use this system". Ask for two things, one at a time.
Look at them the way a customer would. If something is wrong, go back to the design system chat and fix the decision there, never in the one-pager. The one-pager is a copy. The system is the source.
Publish and set as default
Back on the design system page, tick Published and set it as the organisation default. From this moment, every new project anyone in your organisation starts in Claude Design begins inside your brand, and Claude Design checks its own output against the system before showing it.
When a decision changes later, come back to this page and tell the chat, by number: "Decision 4 changes, the accent is now [colour]. Update the system and list what else it touches." One place, one change.
Use it every week
On the home screen, your design system now shows in the composer, and the templates below it are the documents your team makes: slides, documents, HTML email, UI mockups, social visuals.
The ask always has the same shape: what it is, who reads it, what it must contain, and the two rules that keep the system in charge. One asset per request.
- One thing at a time. A deck, then a one-pager. Never "make everything".
- Ask to see, then pick. Options side by side, labelled, and you answer with a letter.
- Say what must not change. "Keep every word, change only the design", or the reverse.
- Ask it to check itself. "Check this against the ten decisions" costs nothing and catches most drift before a colleague sees it.
- Fix the source, not the copy. Anything wrong in a document is fixed in the design system, so the next document is right too.
The full guide, free.
Leave your details and the eight moves, the ten decisions and every prompt open up on this page. Nothing to download.
Open the guide →Real, and also limited.
You now have a shared brand system that the whole team works inside, in Claude Design. Anyone can brief it in plain language and get work that follows your decisions. That alone removes most of the approval loop for the documents marketing and sales make every week. Here is what it does not do.
- It governs only what is made inside Claude Design. Your website code, your video editor, your contractors' tools and every old template on the shared drive load nothing. Coverage is binary: installed, governed; not installed, drifting.
- There is no version history. The system changes when someone edits it in the chat. In six months nobody will know what changed, when, or why.
- Nothing checks before a human reads. The check happens because you asked for it in the prompt. Forget to ask, and nothing catches the mistake.
- A change does not travel. When decision 4 changes, the old decks, the templates in other tools and the website do not hear about it.
- The AI cannot make the decisions. Only show you options and enforce what you chose. If move 5 kept coming back to "neither, show me more", that is not a tooling problem. It is the actual brand work, and it needs a senior brand mind, not a better prompt.
The next step up is to treat the decisions as infrastructure rather than a project in one tool: one rule store that every tool loads before it builds anything, coding tools, design tools and video editing alike; numbered decisions kept as a log; every change shipped as a versioned release; and an automatic check that refuses a release when a rule is broken, before a person ever reviews it. That is what Catalys AI installs as Design Catalyst: your in-house AI designer, with your brand as the law it works under. We built it on ourselves first. Our own website is produced by it, and the recording of it building a page in eleven minutes, catching two wrong colours on the way, is in the build log.
Want to talk it through?
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