No sloppy design assets

I’ve been up late exploring, and I’m really amazed at something that sounds obvious the moment you say it out loud. If Claude is fed correctly, it doesn’t come up with sloppy design assets.

I want to be precise about sloppy, because the word gets thrown at anything a model draws that a designer wouldn’t have drawn. I mean the almost-right asset. The type is close to yours. The spacing is close to a system. A component is a memory of the real component. Nothing is broken enough to reject at a glance, and nothing is right enough to use. So you design it anyway, on top of the generation. That’s the slow way to do work you already knew how to do, with an extra file to clean up at the end.

That was the shape of a lot of these nights. Explore, wince, fix. The fix was never a mystery of prompting. It was whatever context hadn’t been in the room when I asked for the frame.

Not a single frame

This time I didn’t touch a single frame. I didn’t touch a font. I didn’t touch an asset. What you can see is the work as it came back, not a version I went in and corrected. The frames were not nudged. The type was not swapped. The assets were not replaced by hand after the fact. I’m saying that plainly because it’s the easy part to exaggerate, and it happens to be the part that surprised me.

Correctly fed

Correctly fed is the whole idea. Claude fills whatever you leave empty, and the fill is a generic idea of a decent interface. Generic is what reads as sloppy the second you set it next to a product that already has a point of view. The model isn’t being careless on purpose. It doesn’t have your decisions, so it makes a fresh set, and a fresh set will not match the one you already have.

Feeding it is not a longer prompt written at the last minute. It’s the context you give it when you design. The type you actually use. The components you already trust. The way space works in this product, and the things you would be annoyed to see redrawn from scratch. Leave that out and the asset is a guess you then have to correct. Put it in and the asset has your decisions to stand on, instead of a plausible substitute.

That damn design system

Which is why it really is about that damn design system, and about feeding your AI with context when you design.

A design system is that context, written down so it doesn’t only live in your head. Designers already work this way when the other person in the file is a person. You don’t ask them to invent the button. You point them at the button you decided on. I still catch myself treating a model as if it will be more careful than that, and then being annoyed when it invents a second system beside the real one. It won’t be more disciplined than what you fed it. It will be exactly that disciplined, and loose in every gap you left.

So the work that matters is the system, and the feeding of it. Not the individual frame. The frame is what falls out once the system is actually in the context, the same way a screen falls out of a library when you use the library. I can tell the difference on this one because I didn’t have to open it and repair it. No frame. No font. No asset. That’s a different night from the one where generating is just the first draft of a correction session.

Made on Paper

The assets were made on Paper, with Claude.

Paper is where they were made. Claude is what I was exploring with, late, and fed properly for once. The design system was the context. Skip the system and you get the sloppy assets. Feed it and, on this night at least, you don’t.

If the assets are coming out sloppy, I wouldn’t start by asking the model to try harder. I’d look at what it was given. The design system is the piece that’s tempting to skip, because describing a screen feels faster than maintaining a library. The description is how the almost-right frame happens. The system is how it doesn’t. Feed the context in while you design, not once you’re already in the file replacing type and components by hand.

That’s the exploration. Late, and pretty clear by the end of it. Correctly fed, Claude didn’t come up with sloppy design assets. I didn’t touch a single frame, nor a font, or an asset. The rest is the system.