Most people open Claude Design the same way: pick a template, type a name, and start prompting. That’s exactly why their slides come out looking generic, and why they burn tokens trying to rescue decks that were never going to work.
Here’s the pattern break. The best walkthrough I’ve seen flips the whole order. It front-loads three simple files before you ever ask for a single slide, and every fix you make from then on carries forward to future designs. I found this breakdown from Jeff Su, and honestly it changed how I think about AI design tools. He proves it too, showing an actual deck he used to run a paid workshop, plus a newer one that looks even cleaner.
The core idea is small but powerful. Do the prep work once. Reuse it forever.
🧠 The old way vs the new way
The old way is prompt-and-pray. You describe your look every single time, hope the AI remembers your brand, and start from a blank canvas on every deck. The new way builds a foundation first, so the tool already knows your colors, fonts, logo, and voice before you ask for anything.
The creator breaks it into three inputs that build on each other:
- A DESIGN.md file (the rulebook)
- A design system inside Claude Design (the style guide)
- A reusable template (the layout)
Each one feeds the next. That’s the whole trick.
📄 Input 1: The DESIGN.md file
Think of this as a plain text rulebook for how a design should look and feel. Exact colors, fonts, spacing, and how buttons or cards get styled. The clever part is you don’t write it from scratch.
The author points to a public GitHub repo packed with DESIGN.md files from major brands. He grabs Stripe’s file, then drops it into ChatGPT with a simple prompt: remove the proprietary brand content, replace it using your own judgment, keep everything else the same, and rename it something like the subtle gradient design system.
Why clean it? Because Claude Design won’t copy a real brand’s guidelines directly. So you keep all the useful structure and detail, just make it safe to use. A minute of work and you’ve got your first input.
🎨 Input 2: The design system
Next, that raw file gets turned into something Claude Design can actually use natively. The creator compares it to optimizing software to run on a Mac instead of a Windows PC. Same colors and fonts, just formatted the way the tool likes.
Here’s how he sets it up:
- Start a new chat and pick the latest Opus model (great results without the heavier token cost of the top tier)
- Set effort to max
- Click “create design system”
- Give it a short description like “gradient design system, subtle and minimalistic”
- Scroll to the bottom and upload the DESIGN.md file
Then you wait. It takes roughly 10 to 20 minutes because the tool is reading every color, font, and spacing rule, then generating real sample slides and components so you can actually see the style and react to it.
When it’s done, you get mockups to review. Something off? Hit the feedback button and describe the change in plain English, like swapping a dark color for a hex code from your own palette. The expert also uploads extras here: a voice principles file so future copy sounds like him (no em dashes, no corporate jargon), his business logo, and icons he reuses constantly. Now every future design pulls from all of that automatically.
🧩 Input 3: The reusable template
This is where it all connects. The design system controls how things look. The template controls how a deck is laid out, which slides exist, and how they’re arranged. Together, every new deck starts on brand and pre-structured instead of blank.
He simply asks Claude Design to build a slide deck template for workshops and trainings and lets it pick the slide count. Then he refines it with plain feedback: add the gradient mesh to every white slide, kill the ugly orange backgrounds, scale up text to fill empty space, and drop his logo in the footer.
The compounding magic: feedback that carries forward
This is the part I think is a genuine breakthrough. When you give feedback, you can ask Claude Design to create a claude.md file that stores your standing instructions and reads it before every new design. So your corrections stack up over time instead of vanishing.
The person who made this also shows two kinds of feedback:
- Project-level: applies to this deck and every future deck (saved in that claude.md file)
- Slide-level surgical edits: use the edit button to change one element, or annotate to draw a circle around parts of a slide and describe what you want
He even shows the “tweaks” feature, which creates toggles for decisions that touch every slide at once. One switch to show or hide your logo across the whole deck. Another for slide numbers. Flip them on and off before committing, and save a default.
A few practical tips he stresses
- When Claude Design pauses to ask questions before building, answer carefully. A few extra minutes here saves hours later.
- Unsure how to answer? Use the “decide for me” option.
- Stay in the same project and start a new chat for your next deck, so all your learnings carry over.
- Export to a standalone HTML file for flexibility. It opens in any browser, and he even added a presenter view button with interactive speaker notes.
And remember, this isn’t just for slides. The same workflow powers social carousels, newsletters, and email visuals.
The full video walks through every click in about 15 minutes, and it’s worth watching to see the mockups evolve in real time. Go check it out, then try building your own three files.