Cindy Zhu.
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The briefing prompt for on-brand decks in Claude Design

Hey, it's Cindy ๐ŸŒฑ You commented DESIGN, so here is the exact brief I paste into Claude Design.
btw the waitlist for AI System Club is now open! If you're keen on using AI to automate your content, video editing, job search, business or build AI agents, feel free to sign up (only if you want to hehe). Ps. the waitlist gets first dibs:)
๐Ÿ’ก The plan gate, honestly. Claude Design is in beta and included with Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise. It is not on the free plan. On Enterprise it is off by default and an admin has to switch it on. It runs on web and desktop only, so this is not a phone workflow. Details in Anthropic's getting started article.
the real problem

Why AI decks come out generic

People type "make me a pitch deck about my coaching business" and get back something that looks like every other AI deck: purple gradient, stock icons, three bullet points a slide. Then they blame the tool. The tool did exactly what it was told, which was almost nothing.

On brand is not a style you ask for, it is a set of constraints you hand over. There are four of them, and if any one is missing Claude fills the gap with its own defaults.

๐ŸŒฑ Colour, with roles Not "use warm colours". Hex codes, and what each one is FOR: page background, body text, the one accent that buttons and emphasis use.
๐Ÿ’ก Type, with a scale A heading font, a body font, and the sizes. Two fonts with a clear size ladder reads designed. Five fonts reads like a school project.
๐Ÿง  Layout rules Spacing, corner radius, how much white space sits around things. This is the invisible half of why a deck feels premium or cramped.
๐Ÿ‘ฉโ€๐Ÿ’ป Voice rules How you write headlines, what you never say, sentence case or title case. Design and copy fail together, so brief them together.

no brand kit yet?

Pull your brand out of what you already have

If you do not have hex codes written down anywhere, do not guess and do not skip this. Run this in a normal Claude chat first, and keep the answer. It takes about three minutes and it is the input for everything below.

๐ŸŒฑ extract my brand kit
I need you to reverse engineer my brand into a reusable spec. Here is what I have: [paste your website URL, and attach your logo, two or three posts or slides you like, and anything else that already looks like you].

Give me the exact hex codes you can see, and label each one with its job: page background, main text, secondary text, the single accent colour used for buttons and emphasis, and one or two supporting tones. For each text colour on each background, give me the contrast ratio so I know it is actually readable. Then identify the fonts, or if you cannot identify them, name the closest freely available web fonts and say why they match.

Finish with a short written description of the feeling: three adjectives that describe it, and three adjectives that describe what it is definitely not. Give me the whole thing as one block I can copy and paste into future prompts.
๐Ÿง  Keep that output somewhere you can grab it in two seconds. A note on your phone is fine. You are going to paste it at the start of every design brief you ever write, so the five minutes you spend now is the last time you do this.

the setup

Open it and set the project up once

  1. ๐ŸŒฑ Open Claude Design. Go to claude.ai/design in your browser, or open it from the sidebar in the Claude desktop app, signed in with the account you already use. Product details live at claude.com/product/design.
  2. ๐Ÿ‘ฉโ€๐Ÿ’ป Create a project and name it properly. Projects are the unit that holds your brand. Name it after the brand, not the task, so "Acme brand" rather than "March deck". Every deck you make inside it will inherit the same look.
  3. ๐Ÿ’ก Attach your design system. This is what makes brand persist. You can bring one in from a GitHub repo, design files, raw uploads, or from your local codebase using the /design-sync command. On a Team or Enterprise workspace, a new project inherits the organisation's design system automatically, so there is nothing to upload.
  4. ๐Ÿง  Feed it context before you ask for anything. Upload the raw material: screenshots of designs you like, your existing slides, a document, a spreadsheet, your logo files. It accepts DOCX, PPTX and XLSX, and there is a web capture tool for grabbing elements straight off your own site.
  5. ๐ŸŒฑ Paste the brief. The one below. One long, specific paragraph set beats five rounds of "make it more on brand" afterwards.
  6. ๐Ÿ‘ฉโ€๐Ÿ’ป Refine, do not re-roll. When something is off, fix that thing rather than regenerating the whole deck. The refinement section further down covers which tool to reach for.

the one you came for

The on-brand deck brief

Fill the brackets, paste the whole thing in one message. Do not trim it down, the specificity is doing the work.

๐Ÿ’ก the on-brand deck brief
Build me a [number]-slide [pitch deck / client proposal / workshop deck] called "[title]". The audience is [who they are, what they already know, and what they are deciding]. The single thing I need them to believe by the end is [the one idea]. The action I want at the end is [what they do next].

Brand, use these exactly and do not substitute anything: background [hex], body text [hex], accent used for emphasis and buttons only [hex], supporting tones [hex and hex]. Headings in [font], body in [font]. It should feel [three adjectives] and never [three adjectives to avoid]. Copy rules: sentence case for every heading, no exclamation marks, no jargon, and headlines that state the point rather than label the slide, so "Retention is where the money leaked" instead of "Overview".

Structure: open on the problem in the audience's own words, then the shift that changed things, then my approach in [number] parts, then the proof, then the offer, then a single clear next step. One idea per slide. Anything comparative or numeric becomes a chart or a simple diagram rather than a bullet list. Keep the words on each slide to what a person can read while I am talking over them.

Before you build, show me the slide-by-slide outline as a numbered list with the real headline for each slide, and wait for me to approve it. After I approve, build the whole deck, then tell me the two slides you think are weakest and exactly what you would need from me to fix them.
๐ŸŒฑ The "wait for me to approve the outline" line is the highest-value sentence in that brief. Approving twelve headlines takes ninety seconds. Rebuilding twelve designed slides because the story was wrong takes an afternoon.

the part most people miss

Make the brand permanent, not per-prompt

Pasting your brand into every prompt works, but it is the manual version. There are two ways to stop doing it, and they cover different halves of your work.

  1. ๐ŸŽฏ Inside Claude Design: the project design system. Attach your system to the project once, using an upload, a repo or /design-sync. Every new design in that project starts from your colours, type and components without you mentioning them. This covers everything you make on the canvas.
  2. ๐Ÿ’ก Outside it: a brand skill. A skill is a small folder with a SKILL.md inside that holds your rules, and Claude pulls it in automatically when a request matches. This is what carries your brand into normal chats, documents, captions and code, not only the design canvas.
  3. ๐Ÿง  Ask Claude to write the skill for you. You do not write code. Use the prompt below, then ask it to package the result as a zipped folder.
  4. ๐Ÿ‘ฉโ€๐Ÿ’ป Install it. In the Claude app, go to Customize, then Skills, then Add, then Upload a skill, and upload that zip. In Claude Code, drop the folder into ~/.claude/skills/. Custom skills work on every plan, Free included. Official steps: creating custom skills.
๐Ÿง  build my brand skill
Turn my brand into a reusable skill so I never have to paste my brand rules into a prompt again. Here is my brand spec: [paste the brand kit block you made earlier].

Write the SKILL.md for it. Give it a short lowercase hyphenated name based on my brand (do not put "claude" or "anthropic" in the name, or the upload gets rejected), and a description that says both what it does and when to use it, because that description is what makes you reach for it automatically. Make the description cover anything visual or written that goes out under my name: slides, documents, social posts, landing pages, email.

The instructions should hold the exact hex codes with their roles, the fonts and the size ladder, the spacing and corner radius rules, and my copy rules including sentence case headings and the words I never use. Add a short "do not" list of the generic choices I want you to avoid. When it is done, package it as a zipped folder I can upload, and tell me one sentence I can say in future to invoke it.

the craft

Fix things without losing the deck

There are four ways to change something on the canvas, and picking the wrong one is how people end up worse off than the first draft. Match the tool to the size of the problem.

๐Ÿ’ก Chat for structure New sections, a different narrative order, anything that needs explaining. This is the tool for big moves only.
๐Ÿง  Comments for one element Leave an inline comment on the exact thing: "this headline is too long", "tighten this spacing". Targeted, and it leaves the rest alone.
๐Ÿ‘ฉโ€๐Ÿ’ป Direct edits for layout Drag, resize, align and edit text in place on the canvas. Faster than describing a two-pixel problem in a sentence.
๐ŸŒฑ Sliders for taste Adjustment controls tune spacing, colour and layout live, then you can ask Claude to apply that change across the whole deck at once.
๐Ÿ‘ฉโ€๐Ÿ’ป the consistency pass
Do a consistency pass across the whole deck before I export it, and show me what you changed as a list.

Check that every heading uses the same font, size and case, that body text is the same size everywhere except where a size change is deliberate, that the accent colour appears only on genuine emphasis rather than decoration, and that the spacing between a heading and its body is identical on every slide. Fix anything that drifted.

Then read it as an audience member who knows nothing about me: tell me the first slide where you got confused, the slide with the most words on it, and the one slide I could delete without losing the argument.

getting it out

Export it where you actually finish

Nothing is trapped in the canvas. You can download a zip, or export to PDF, PPTX or standalone HTML. You can also send it to tools you already use, including Adobe, Base44, Canva, Gamma, Lovable, Miro, Replit, Vercel and Wix, or hand it off to Claude Code if the design needs to become a real build.

๐Ÿง  The honest limits. It is beta, and Anthropic names the rough edges itself: inline comments sometimes do not persist, very large codebases slow it down, and two people editing the same project at once is still unreliable. Output quality also tracks the quality of what you feed it, so a vague brief and no brand kit will still give you a vague deck. Treat it as genuinely fast first-draft design with a real export path, and keep your final polish wherever you already trust it.

Proof

Anthropic, introducing Claude Design
Claude Design product page (features, exports, plans)
Get started with Claude Design (Help Center)
Claude Design admin guide for Team and Enterprise
Creating custom skills (Help Center)
Agent Skills, official overview

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