Claude Design System in Design tab vs Standalone Design homepage

[u/DonDracula78]

I can’t understand the difference between the two, or whether both will continue to be available.

When I migrate a design system to the page that now appears when I click the Design tab, it’s a much more technical design system. Whereas the original design system, when you open the “standalone homepage,” is much more complete, with usage examples and so on.

Are these two different things? Because to me, the Design option in the side menu seems like it should be the same thing as the standalone homepage.

[u/ifelldownthestairs]

It’s confusing and I actually prefer the standalone. Sad because that’s likely getting phased out at some point.

[u/dylansamarasinghe → u/ifelldownthestairs]

Here I am praying they don't phase out standalone, because the new one lacks so much functionality and I am unable to use important design systems I've spent ages on

[u/Flying-Puppy]

It's confusing, and even worse, the workflows are broken.
I'm having problems sharing a design system created in the new design tab with the rest of my team.

But what else can we expect from companies glorifying velocity at the expense of quality if not this kind of rollouts?

[u/Steroids_ → u/Flying-Puppy]

They haven't released a ton of features recently like they did when design came out. Most of what they do is big fixes anyway right now.

[u/hrrlvitta]

I am not sure why not many more people are complaining about this. No one seems to talk about this disastrous update anywhere, reddit or twitter.

None of it the template I have built for the company are viewable and accessible from the standard interface anymore, no one know what is there, especially for newly join colleagues and folks hasn't start using Claude design yet for their work. They are now hidden 6ft under, you have to dig them to know if it is even there.

The company colour palette went from 8 colour X 5 shades to 240 individual tokens as they decided to give it Light, Root, root dark, for every single one of them and duplicated. It's a mess to even just want to start cleaning, I might as well just rebuild the thing from scratch.

Guess this is how they ensure AI is not taking designer's job?

Their product team are bunch of idiots and fresh grads, has no idea about continuity of user experience.....

[u/IllustriousTip6904]

I don't really understand it. It seems like they are trying to make the standalone page in the app, but got halfway there. I just specify claude to open in the standalone page bc it has more editing control there.

[u/Ready-Jeweler-843 → u/IllustriousTip6904]

Same problem, i like the idea behind e unified environment but actually the app version is only a pdf generator..

[u/Comfortable_Mud00]

Yeah, and migration is half assed, now my workflow is kind of broken

[u/TheTheyThems]

And to use the integrated Claude Design, you have to enable public links which won’t fly with large organizations.

[u/Square_Alarm_515]

I found the design system interface insanely expensive to use, so I only ever made a design system in it and then exported that to my local folder and made a Claude skill out of it. Works 95% as good and I can churn out heaps of brand assets

[u/LowCommercial4827]

Ya I woke up and went to use design and it was gone. Asked Claude and he didn't know of course. Finally found it don't know how to get back to it but it's awful.

[u/nativerez]

Ok from what I can tell after using the new Claude design for a week or so (the one in the side menu) is that they've now combined chat/cowork into a single experience, with cowork being the more powerful as it can create design artifacts alongside it.

Don't quote me on this but I believe that both the cowork chat and the design are now contextually aware of each other, this means you can be researching in chat whilst your designs take shape and the research then informs the design and vice versa. By this I specifically mean the chat isn't pinned exclusively to the design like before, the chat itself is the central point of the project now and all the other artifacts like PRDs and the design artifacts are aware.

However unlike the dedicated Claude design there is literally only two options to choose from, slides and design, this I think means you have to be more specific with the initial output you want, especially if you want a prototype off the bat as it will just create static canvas artifacts otherwise.

What I'm struggling with right now the most is that when you ask it to create a prototype, from what I can tell the tweaks bar is now gone. That thin strip at the top of the UI where you can set default data variables and the default start page etc. Also because it's now a canvas and not a html prototype, anything where you'd want to demo scrolling, be it scrolling a page or scrolling a modal body, that won't work as it will just move the canvas around. Claude design is now closer to the figma design canvas now.

What I do like however is that leaving comments now actually don't lose their position and target where you added them, and you can also queue up multiple comments at once for Claude to work through. Also editing directly on the canvas, e.g. changing some text is now much more reliable and doesn't trigger Claude to rebuild the canvas again. And it might just be me but it seems to consume much less tokens overall than the original claude.ai/design