Chapter 08
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Reference
A three-question surface picker, a copy-ready brief, the session checklist, and the sources everything here is verified against.
Which surface, right now?
Three questions. The widget is not the point — these are the questions worth asking before you open anything.
A copy-ready brief
Fill the five fields, paste it as your first prompt, and let the refinement channels do the rest.
WHO IT IS FOR [The reader, specifically. Not "users" — "ops managers who check this once every morning."] WHERE THEY MEET IT [Phone or desk. With a narrator or alone. Arriving from where, in what mood, with how much patience.] THE ONE THING IT CANNOT FAIL AT [A single sentence. If you list three, you have listed none.] THE EXIT [Prototype / standalone URL / Canva / PPTX / PDF / Claude Code handoff. State it now — it constrains the design and cannot be retrofitted.] CONSTRAINTS THAT ACTUALLY BIND [Length, brand system, required content. Two at most. Everything else, let Claude decide and correct later.]
The session checklist
Eight boxes. If you tick them all, most of Chapter 07 cannot happen to you.
- The design system is current — Claude has seen this codebase or brand since the last change to it.
- The brief names a reader, not an audience segment.
- The brief names one thing it cannot fail at.
- The brief names the exit — and the design stays inside that format's grammar.
- Local problems get comments; only structural ones get a new prompt.
- A fix that applies everywhere was made once and propagated, not described in the abstract.
- Anything shared is labelled a prototype if that is what it is.
- Before building: the handoff bundle goes to Claude Code, not a screenshot.
Sources
Every capability claim in this guide traces to one of these. None of it is inferred from the product's marketing alone.
- Anthropic — “Introducing Claude Design by Anthropic Labs”, 17 April 2026. The launch announcement: research-preview status, Claude Opus 4.7, plan availability, the split surface, and the four refinement channels.
- Contemporaneous coverage, April–July 2026 — VentureBeat, CMSWire, DataCamp, MacStories and TechDogs on the canvas, the design-system onboarding, the web capture tool and the export paths.
- Practitioner writing on the export seam, 2026. The recurring report that failures cluster after export rather than on the canvas — the basis of Chapter 06 and the first row of the failure table.
- Anthropic documentation on Enterprise administration, where Claude Design ships off by default and is enabled per organisation.
Standing caveat
Claude Design is in research preview. Everything here is dated to July 2026 and will drift. Audition the product in the task in front of you rather than in your memory of this page.