How to Get Bespoke AI Design (Without Being a Designer)

Baird

Yeah, definitely. A- and, a lot of this started for me, you know, Claude Design just came out about a month ago or so, and that definitely improved the output of AI in design. But I don't know if you've seen it, but there's so many sites now and so many, like, pieces of AI design that now look like Claude Design versus, you

Brendan

Yep

Baird

the Tailwind default, which is what I'd call the design

Brendan

Yeah. Right. Yeah,

Baird

the past

Brendan

a new level of similarity or like default design

Baird

The, the baseline has gotten higher, but it still is just like, it all looks so similar. And so… Oh, go ahead.

Brendan

Yeah, I, I think, you know, you and I talked about the stuff you'd been doing like this a little bit last week, and I, I wanna say, like, the, the word that probably fits this best is making it a little bit more bespoke, right? Like, how do you get back to making it feel like a person designed it? 'Cause in a lot of ways, like, that's the goal here. We don't want the AI to make all the decisions, but we also want to trust the AI to at least know what to do with some of the guidance that we give it, right?

Baird

Yeah. It, it's all about, uh, intentionality to me. And for-- from an AI perspective, it's how do you still have that intentionality but not have to execute completely on your own? And so, yeah, we can right in. And so kind of the place I started was, you know, I had built a personal site about, uh, don't know, it was maybe two years ago at this point. And recently,

Brendan

was that with or without AI at that point?

Baird

was actually pre-AI. It was, like, right before AI got good enough to do it. I think

Brendan

Yep

Baird

a revision of it with AI, but

Brendan

Okay

Baird

I was like, "You know, I'm not really happy with where it was looking," and I can actually pull that up right now. you know, this is my current site, and it's not a-- or actually, I shouldn't even say current. I've already pushed the new one live. But this was my old site that I hand did, and, you know, it's not a terrible looking website, but there, you know, I'm-- I have a decent design sense, but I'm not what you would call a traditional designer. And so it's really, in my mind, I was like, "How can I make this better but not have to be, you know, super involved?" Because I'm already busy, so trying to redo my website and having to do it completely by hand, just takes more time than I'm usually willing to put in. And so

Brendan

Yeah, and, and just back to the, the stuff we talked about at the top, it's like, sure, either one of us… 'Cause I felt the same way, like I haven't even built a personal site in a long time, and I could easily go, and we both could've just gone straight to Claude and said, "Build me a site." But this is, you know, th- this is supposed to be your portfolio in a lot of ways, even if you're not a designer, so you do want it to be more unique, right? So that's probably a lot of, lot what you're thinking as well, I would guess.

Baird

Yeah, e-e-exactly. And so it had kind of been in the back of my mind for a while, and then day, you know, I just see design inspiration, whether it's on LinkedIn or a bunch of other places that I look at. And so I come across this site, which I really like Swiss design and like kind of the minimal grid-based design, and so this looked really cool to me. And s- and I was like, "What if I tried to do my portfolio like this?" And I kinda challenged myself. It wasn't like a, "Hey, I want to rip this off and just have AI do it exactly like this." I was like, I wonder if I could, instead of like jumping into Claude Design, which, you know, Claude Design is very much around skills, you know, like they have the front end design skill, which Anthropic created, and I think that's like the core of that product works, and then they actually create like custom skills for you, for your system. And I'm like, you know, I wonder, instead of just like throwing it all into Claude Design, can I just do that directly through, you know, kind of a combination. I-- you could probably do it directly through Claude Code, but I was like, jump into just Claude Chat first.

And so I really just gave it the link and asked it to not cop it, copy it, but like extract a system out of it, extract the patterns, ex- you know, because I'm not a classically trained designer, so it's like, what are the things that make this design what it is? And I, like I said, it's, it's definitely Swiss, which is a big reference for it, and like I've had a lot of experience with that, with the people I've worked with in the past, so I know a lot about it. But I had the AI first like deconstruct what that even looks like from a systematic perspective. And so you can see it kinda called it out, and then I actually told it to create a skill that system first, and it goes through and actually creates some example layouts just to show you what it's thinking. You can kinda keep pushing it if you want to, and then it actually comes out creating a skill you. And so looking at that real quick, you know, it just gives you the color system, typography system, grid system, like all the things that are kind of the building blocks.

so from there, I was able to take that over to Claude Code and just the skill on my website, and it actually went through and it and This is what we ended up with, just kind of running it through. And a- again, like this took me maybe a day of playing around with, and like this wasn't even the first shot of the skill. Like I had it run it and then I tweaked it, I refined it. I actually made it more what I wanted it to be. But it's that first take that you get when you kind of go through, you find what you like, you run it through to extract those patterns, create that skill, have it take a first pass at it, and then you iterate on it. You know, it, it's a lot like what we talked about with code in the past too, is like you're never gonna get the right thing the first time, if you get it far enough and then you iterate, like you can actually add that intentionality into it

Brendan

Yeah, that's really cool. And, you know, you already answered one of my questions, which was, you know, was this the first shot? You already said it wasn't. But I- I'm kind of curious because I- I've obviously I've done some design stuff with Claude and, and also without

Baird

Yeah. Yep

Brendan

you know, I-- most of what I've built with Claude that at least has UI is like so basic, I don't really care. I'm using it myself right now, so I'm not pushing back. So I'm kind of curious, like with this skill and getting, you know, at least a baseline out of the box that you wanted, what does the iteration process look like at that point? Are you actually editing the skill? Are you just working with Claude like normal at that point?

Baird

I think you can do both. Uh, I-- way I would approach it is iterate outside of the skill first. So it's like once you have the design, the skill's more like executing the system, not necessarily the design itself. So it's like it informs the design, but I think it's kind of a twofold thing, where if it's something like, "Oh, I wanna change, you know, you know, content or some of the structural things," like, you know, "I want a different style button," or something like that, iterate on that first, and then once you get to the end of something and you're liking it, then you can again, like create that cycle. So you then update the skill to fit where you got the system to through that iteration process. So I mean, it really, you know, everything right now is about agent loops and, you know,

Brendan

Right

Baird

loops for AI. It's the same for design. just, in my mind, you need more human intervention to really, like, have that taste and have that intentionality to it of like, it to look like this," or, looking pretty good, but it needs to get pushed further." And like, you know, I, I iterated on things like color. I iterated on things like fonts. I, you know, had it choose different fonts and kind of played with that. And, you know, I was doing some design stuff at work and found a font I liked there, so I brought that in. And so it really can be, I mean, obviously if you like it, you let it go, but if you don't or if y- there's pieces you don't like, I think it's kind of that human then, where it's like you truly can go in and get your hands dirty. But your point, I think at the end of the day, you then pull that back out into the skill, especially if you're planning on like, you know, if I was gonna blow my site out to be, you know, bring in a blog or bl- bring in other pages, you really wanna make sure that skill gets pulled out and updated so that it takes in all the system that you put together as you go.

Brendan

Yep. Got it. Cool

Baird

And I'll say, you know, another thing that, you know, obviously this was kind of a, a bigger example of like, "Hey, I've got a site that I like and I wanna go work from that perspective." one way to do it. The other thing I would say if you just wanna be like, "I want my design to look better, but I don't want it to go through all that effort," there's a couple different places you can start. And front-end design, like the skill that Anthropic created, is one good place to start. And you can see it's not radically different than what I showed before. It does give you like the design thinking, you know, what are the themes, typography, typography, you know, aesthetics in general. And it's j- really just like giving the AI a place to start that isn't your default. I will say front-end design now is getting to be more like if you just jump into cloud design, I'm pretty sure this is like the foundation of what they're running there.

Brendan

Okay

Baird

one that I ran into recently that's been interesting is one called Impeccable, this one you actually have a whole suite of commands to it. Let me see if they show them here. Um, again, it, you know, does all the typical design stuff, but in here you can actually do things like have it critique. Where is critique? It's somewhere in here. That doesn't matter. Um, but you can have it like critique your design and it'll actually go in and say like, "How close is this to a typical AI website?" You know? So it'll actually do some critique on the design, but then you can also like do an audit. You can have it build stuff on it. You can then have it like do those iteration loops of like polish as you go, and it'll polish certain features. And is kind of a, you get your feet wet, if you really wanna start pushing on this further, this is a good place to go next of how can I-- I mean, you almost learn the design process a little bit

Brendan

Mm-hmm.

Baird

you go through this, 'cause it has it very pulled out in terms of like how you can approach it, how you can think of it, and it d- gives you a lot of interesting information about it. So it's really kind of that laddering up, which again, we've talked about this tech stuff so much where, you know, AI by default is interesting, but the more you can add like the right context and the right skills and those types of things and your, taste, intuition, and your thinking, putting all that all together, you can get past the AI default get to something that is more what you actually wanna do.

Brendan

Yeah. Yeah, that's really cool. And that, to your point there at the end,, just reminds me of something I've been thinking about a lot, and even just… I, I saw a YouTube video, I think it was, where the, the person in the video was just talking about how the Anthropic team at least, and I would imagine it's the same with OpenAI, I just haven't seen any videos on it, but they are, layering skills to actually write the code, and they're not just using prompts. And to me, this is like the same idea, except it's

Baird

Yeah

Brendan

design focused. And that makes a lot of sense, because these models are very smart. We know that.

Baird

Auf Wiedersehen

Brendan

But just like a, person that's working with you, whether it's AI or not, if you give it very vague, idea of what to do, it's gonna give you kind of vague, generic output. It's not gonna really know what to work with. So yeah, th- this is really cool. The impeccable one here, it-- this one, uh, who, who's this one from?

Baird

Um, that's a good question. I think it's I think it actually just is a company or a person that's kinda created the system

Brendan

Okay. But, so it's in the skills, uh, directory

Baird

So if you, yeah, if you go to skills.sh, you can find, I mean, of these skills obviously, but it's

Brendan

Yep

Baird

the skills out there, so, um,

Brendan

Cool. And we'll link to it too, so

Baird

yep, for sure. A- and I'm sure there's a ton of other ones that do similar things, like most skills, it's like everybody's got their own version of it. But the fun thing is, is that you can, to your point of layering skills, you can put these things inside of your custom skill as well. So it'd

Brendan

Right

Baird

you know, use this skill as you're doing it so that you don't even need to necessarily start with Impeccable or Front End Design. You start with your custom skill and just tell it what it needs to do with these tools to actually make it repeatable. And so, skills, I mean, obviously everybody's using skills these days, but they are really powerful to create these, composable ways to add these layers of, more custom on top of that default

Brendan

Yep. Yeah, exactly. Cool. Um, and was there anything else you wanted to share on this?

Baird

Yeah, I'll say the, the one other thing I, I did just, you know, obviously just showed you one design and maybe that was just a, a fluke of getting something that was pretty decent pretty quickly. And so we were working on, we've got our website, and so to do a quick test because we were working on thumbnails and like how can we push our thumbnails to a, a more consistent place. And I had built thumbnails, working with Claude and just doing some design work, and we were liking that thought. And so it's like, "Hey, let me try just taking that instead of like another website and giving that to the AI and working with it." And, again this was not even a day's worth of work, and we went from something that, you know, this site, nothing wrong with it, but it was one shot. It was a typical one-shot AI generation and it

Brendan

Yep

Baird

but it definitely doesn't feel like it was intentionally crafted.

Brendan

Yeah, in, in fact, I can even speak to that really quick since I did it initially. Like, I think all I did was basically give it some colors and say, "Hey, we wanna show the YouTube videos and we wanna show the, uh, podcasts," right? So it was pretty straightforward. I didn't expect much. To your point, it was fairly generic. It, it did, it did avoid the purple and black common from AI bec- only because I told it, "Hey, I want these colors

Baird

Yeah, e-exactly. But going from there to, you know, just running it through the process we just talked about, we get to something where these are the new thumbnails that we put together, and you're just starting to add some more design elements like the pixelation and some of these eyebrow things and, just-- Again, this isn't anything crazy, but it just makes it a little bit more intentional, a little bit more ownable versus just doing something that you don't take any time putting in, and, and like sometimes you don't need to. Sometimes it's like we just need to build something quick and get it out there, and that's, that's totally fine. But when you wanna kinda keep pushing things, the awesome part about it is this doesn't take a lot of time. As long as you have these patterns to start using, you can start doing better design without actually having to learn to be a designer. You have to know what looks good, at least what you want to look good, and then you just work with the AI like you do with anything and figure out, using skills is definitely way to go with it.

But it's also just having that little bit of seed to start pushing it, and you can get it outside of the AI default pretty, pretty quickly

Brendan

Yeah. Yeah, that's really cool to see, and I know you're gonna probably keep using this stuff a lot. So, maybe at some point we can share more of the designs we've been doing, but for now, this is really cool. Thanks for sharing it.

Baird

Yeah, definitely

Brendan

Um, yeah, so I mean, you know, one thing that we've just been thinking about, I know if you've watched some of our other episodes, we sometimes will talk about other things, and we'll have other topics. Sometimes we'll focus in on one topic. Um, but for now we're gonna try doing more focused episodes here. So we're gonna cover design like we just did. Maybe next time we'll add some other things, like maybe we'll talk about some new stuff. But, really quick, I guess because it was a big thing that did drop just recently, I did wanna check in really quickly. Have you used Fable at all yet?

Baird

I actually used Fable a little bit yesterday. So I came across a skill, since we're talking about skills. Somebody had created a skill, I think it was like Efficient Fable or something like that,

Brendan

Okay

Baird

because, I mean, Fable is 2X higher than Opus for usage.

Brendan

Yeah.

Baird

on the $20 a month plan, it's like two minutes worth of Fable and you're out. And so, but this guy was talking about the fact that this skill Fable as the like big decision maker and like d- big planner, and then it hands off to Haiku and Sonnet to do all the actual grunt work. And supposedly it, it does a really good job. And the plan that I got out of Fable when I was planning a new feature for something I'm working on looked interesting. It's just I ran out of usage again pretty quickly with

Brendan

Yep

Baird

I, I didn't get to see the full, you know, end goal, you know, end output from it. And so I can't speak too much for it. Have you played with it at all?

Brendan

I actually haven't had a chance to yet. Um, a- and I guess for me, I'm just not exactly sure what I wanna throw at it. It's like Opus 4… Well, basically ever since 4.6, you know, has been good enough and has been doing the things, and I even go to Sonnet sometimes. And again, with like the skills and things we were just talking about earlier, like I don't feel like I really need much. Now, obviously there are big meaty problems that maybe it would make sense to throw to Fable. I just don't have that right now. So it's interesting, but you know, i- in some ways it's almost more interesting not what the model's doing, but just the pricing and how it does feel like this is, you know… And we had a whole episode about how things are getting expensive. This is just another inflection point, it feels like, where now there's gonna be major differentiation on like how much you're gonna even use the new models versus the, quote-unquote, "older models." Um

Baird

Yeah. No, and, and it is an interesting-- and, like, things have changed even since we talked last because things were expensive and it was getting hard to run. And then, you know, Anthropic signed their deal with SpaceX for

Brendan

Yep

Baird

data center. And now I actually am struggling to use all of my usage just on basic usage right now. And, uh, to be fair, I've been doing more stuff that I can't automate as easily, so I haven't been pushing it as hard. But I, I definitely have seen an improvement there.

Brendan

Same here

Baird

you know, seeing how they're gonna change the Fable pricing after the first two weeks so that it is extra usage. So essentially like you, you can use the API or it's extra usage on your subscription.

Brendan

Yep

Baird

I think we are gonna get to a point where Fable and those level models are going to be either the big companies can use them or they're not gonna be your daily driver. They're not gonna be your most of what you're doing, 'cause I don't think you need it.

Brendan

Right.

Baird

really boil it down, a-and this is actually a test I did that I forgot to mention, is the first site I showed that my, my personal site, I used Claude Code fully for that. For the actual our site, I actually used Devin, which is now what Windsurf is. Windsurf just changed over from Windsurf to Devin, so now it's like the Devin IDE.

Brendan

Okay

Baird

thing. That's kind of a, a side tangent, but I actually used their adaptive model where it chooses the right model and ran through the same processes just with a different model. And what I'm getting at there is just that I'm noticing more that when you have these skills and the right, like, framework, and I mean, it's even to the harness layer around it, model doesn't matter as much. You know, if you've got the right system around it, the model, you know, even Sonnet's smart enough to do most of what you need it to. And so I, I really do think we're getting to that inflection point of like, these bigger models are gonna be for, like you say, the meatier things like, you know. And, and I think you already see a lot of it with like the Mythos stuff is security. You know, that's gonna be a huge one, both people trying to hack into things, but also people trying to secure things. And so it's really gonna start, I think, fragmenting a lot more.

Brendan

Yep. All right, cool. Yeah, I just thought I would check in on that quick. Um, but yeah, thanks for, uh, watching and listening. You know, show notes will be down below. Um, like and subscribe if you, you know, enjoyed this. And, you know, definitely check out Apple Podcasts if you wanna like, you know, give us a five-star rating, that'd be great. That would really help, you know, get more followers. And, uh, yeah, we'll see you next time