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VOLUME ZERO · THE ON-RAMP

What Claude
can design.

A 32-page primer. What this tool actually is, what it's good at, and how designers use it day to day. Read it before you buy anything else.


Pages
32
Level
Absolute beginner
Price
Free
Read time
45 min
A HONEST ON-RAMP

If you've never used
an AI model for design
this is for you.

No jargon. No hype. No "the future is here" preamble. Just what the thing does and how designers actually use it.


What this book is

An orientation guide. Thirty-two pages you can finish in a lunch break.

It explains what Claude is, what it can produce, and where the strongest use cases are for designers in 2026.

It ends with a single short exercise. If it clicks, you'll know whether Vol. 01 is worth buying.

What this book is not

Not a tutorial on any particular product interface. Interfaces change; the method doesn't.

Not a deep dive on prompting. That's Vol. 01 — bought separately.

Not a sales pitch. If AI design isn't for you, this book will help you find out quickly.

Nine things, well. Plenty of things, badly.

A practical inventory. The nine artefacts where the model reliably produces useful output, and what to expect.

01 · DECKS

Slide presentations

Narrative structure, layout, typography. Export to PDF or PPTX. Covered in Vol. 05.

02 · PROTOTYPES

Clickable UI

Functional HTML mocks of apps, landing pages, onboarding flows. Vol. 06.

03 · PRINT

Workbooks, zines, reports

Editorial print layouts like the one you're reading. Vol. 04.

04 · ANIMATIONS

Motion & micro-interactions

Timeline animations, transitions, hero videos. Vol. 07.

05 · SYSTEMS

Design systems & tokens

Colour scales, spacing, type ramps, component libraries. Vol. 08.

06 · BRIEFS

Design writing

Copy, briefs, product descriptions, content audits. Underrated use.

07 · POSTERS

Single-page artefacts

Announcements, social posts, editorial covers.

08 · DATA

Charts & diagrams

Tables, flow diagrams, editorial data viz in SVG/HTML.

09 · CRITIQUE

Design review

Paste a screenshot, get a competent second opinion on hierarchy, rhythm, accessibility.

Where it's weak

Bitmap illustration, photorealistic imagery, complex logomark design, brand strategy from scratch. Use other tools (or humans) for those.

Four typical workflows.

Not everyone uses the tool the same way. Here are the four patterns we see most often in the wild.

01
The sketchpad.
Rapid exploration. Ask for five versions of a hero before committing. Used by senior designers to shortcut the blank page.
02
The junior collaborator.
Delegation. Hand over a brief, get a first-draft artefact, polish it manually. Best for content-heavy work (decks, reports, landing pages).
03
The systems extender.
You have a design system. Claude generates new components in the same language. Great for extending, terrible for inventing.
04
The solo-founder stack.
The whole design function, from landing page to onboarding to pitch deck, done by one person. Covered throughout the series.
ONE EXERCISE

Try it now.
Ten minutes.

If you have Claude open somewhere, paste this prompt. If the result is interesting, Vol. 01 is the next step.

Act as an editorial print designer. Design the cover of a 60-page workbook called "The Patience of Things", a collection of short essays on craft and slowness, for readers of Kinfolk and The School of Life. Constraints: — Warm off-white background (not pure white) — One typeface for display: a humanist serif — One accent colour: deep terracotta — No photography. No illustration. — Title set very large, subtitle small and centred Reference world: Phaidon monographs, Penguin Modern Classics (the 2010s editions), Apartamento magazine. Not Medium, not Canva. Return a single HTML file, US Letter dimensions (8.5 × 11 in at 96dpi = 816 × 1056px), print-ready.

What to look for

— Did it respect the "no photography, no illustration"?

— Did it pick a typeface that feels like the references, not a generic sans?

— Did it use one accent, or sneak in several?

— Does it feel like Phaidon, or like a Canva template?

What to do next

— If it's close: pick one thing to improve and iterate.

— If it's miles off: restart, with more specific references.

— Either way: buy Vol. 01. You'll learn why, and how to do it better.

THANKS FOR READING

Now do it
for real.

Vol. 01 picks up where this ends. Sixty-eight pages on prompting, forty worked examples, fourteen exercises.