Claude Design, Inside Claude Code
Ask for a design, get a canvas you can edit by hand, without leaving the terminal
One command to switch it on: /design consent
Start Here: Paste This
Here from the design video? The feature ships switched off, so there's a one-time step before the prompt. In Claude Code, type /design consent and press enter, which grants the feature access for your account. Typing /design on its own just shows you the switch, and /design revoke turns it off again whenever you like. If the command isn't recognised at all, your Claude Code is too old, so run claude update in your terminal and try again.
Once it's on, you don't type /design before every request. You just ask for a design in plain words, and this is the ask worth pasting:
I'd like you to create a design canvas for me. Before you design anything, interview me one question at a time: what I want designed (a landing page, a poster, a mockup for an app, a social graphic), who it's for, and what look I'm after. If I have an existing website, brand colours or fonts, ask where they live and use the real values from them rather than guessing. Then draft the design as a canvas with a desktop and a phone version where that makes sense, and give me the link. Finish by telling me in one line what you assumed, so I can correct it.Claude asks its questions, drafts the design, and hands you a private link. That link is the interesting part, so keep reading.
What's Actually Going On
Anthropic has a design tool called Claude Design, and an early preview of its canvas editor now runs inside Claude Code. When you ask for a design, Claude doesn't hand you code or a static picture. It publishes a canvas, your design laid out as artboards on an infinite board, behind a private link that opens in your browser.
And the canvas is an editor rather than a screenshot, so you click an element to select it, retype the text in place, and change colours, spacing and fonts in a properties panel. Drag things around, undo with the keyboard, and press Save when you're happy, which keeps a new version for anyone you've shared the link with. You can export any artboard as a PNG, or the whole thing as a PDF.
That's the shift worth noticing. Until now, AI design tools made you choose between describing what you want and taking what you're given, or learning a design app and doing it all yourself. This is both halves in their right order. Claude does the ninety percent, the layout, the structure and a first pass at the copy, and you do the ten percent only you can do, nudging the headline and fixing the colour by hand, on the thing itself, instead of typing "a bit bigger please" into a chat box and hoping.
What It's Good For
Mockups before you build
Sketch the screens of an app or a website before any code exists. It's far cheaper to move a section on a canvas than to rebuild a page, so agree the design first, then hand the approved artboard back to Claude Code to build for real.
Landing pages and one-pagers
A sales page draft, a proposal one-pager, a flyer for an event. Claude drafts it in your brand's colours if you point it at your site, and you fix the words yourself in seconds.
Social graphics and posters
Anything you'd normally open a design app for gets drafted on the canvas, tweaked by hand, and exported as a PNG ready to post.
The Honest Bit
This is a research preview, and it shows in places. It's not at full parity with Claude Design on claude.ai, and it's a drafting surface rather than a publishing one, because the canvas doesn't become your live website. When the design is agreed, you still ask Claude Code to build the real thing, with the canvas as the spec.
It isn't on the free plan either. You need Pro or above, the same requirement as Claude Code itself, and a version of Claude Code from the last few weeks, which is what the claude update in the first section is for.
It's also built for one pair of hands at a time. Two people editing the same canvas at once will fight over saves, which is fine for you and a reviewer and wrong for a live workshop.
Go Deeper
Never used a slash command before? Start with the slash commands guide. New to Claude Code entirely? Build your first website gets you from nothing to a live page, and the canvas makes a lot more sense once you've built something.