Designers reacted in many ways to Claude Design, mostly summing up to: “Claude Design is great, but it’s not ✨real design✨”.

Their general point is that “real design” is about the thinking, the “strategy” before going into Figma, and that’s what actually matters.

In layman’s terms, what designers are saying is: “Claude Design is a Junior Designer”. This is true… and it’s also true that junior designers are valuable teammates that cost money, time, and energy. Now you can get instant junior designers for $200/month.

It is only a matter of time until Design has its Opus 4.5 moment. I hope this will free up junior designers from drudgery and push them to do “real design”, something often reserved for the old guard.

All this sounds eerily similar to what happened to Software. When GPT-3 came out, engineers said that LLMs can’t do “real” engineering, and code wasn’t even the hard or valuable part. That turned out to be very wrong. Code, it turns out, is extremely valuable, and being able to write it counts as useful intelligence.

The same will happen to Design, as prophesied.

What makes this lesson so bitter is that everyone has to learn it their own way, often the hard way.