Course / Foundation

Claude Code for Designers

A hands-on course built from the book of the same name. It takes a designer from never having opened a terminal to running Claude Code on real design work: turning mockups into code, building prototypes, maintaining design systems, automating repetitive design chores, and connecting the agent to the rest of the design toolchain over MCP. Every module ends with a task run against a real project rather than a sandbox.

Modules: 7 modules
Total time: ≈5h 25m
Last updated: 2026-06-02
Your progress: 0/7 modules completed

Start with Module 1

Audience and outcomes / 01

By the end of this course you can…

Product designers and prototypers who want to work directly with a coding agent without becoming engineers — including those who have actively avoided the terminal until now.

Set up Claude Code through Desktop, VS Code, or the CLI and configure permission modes deliberately rather than accepting defaults.

Convert a static mockup or screenshot into working, reviewable front-end code.

Build interactive prototypes that use real components and real data shapes.

Maintain a component library with the agent doing the mechanical work and the designer holding review.

Automate recurring design tasks — audits, documentation, asset production — as repeatable runs.

Connect Claude Code to design tools and team systems over MCP without creating a security mess.

Curriculum / 02

Modules

Every module has a full slide deck with speaker notes and a narration script.

The Design–Code Gap

Why the gap between design intent and shipped product exists, what it costs in handoff loss, and why a coding agent — not another plugin — is the realistic bridge for designers.

Getting Set Up Without Terminal Fear

The three ways into Claude Code — Desktop, the VS Code extension, and the CLI — what permission modes actually control, and a setup path that starts safe and earns trust before granting more access.

From Mockup to Code

The core skill: giving the agent a mockup, a screenshot, or a reference and getting back working front-end code that respects the design — plus the review habits that catch where it does not.

Prototyping and Building

Moving from single sections to working prototypes: multi-screen flows, realistic data, interaction states, and the discipline of keeping prototypes honest about what they are.

Design Systems and Component Libraries

Using the agent on the system itself: building and documenting components, enforcing tokens, finding drift, and handling the long tail of system maintenance that teams never staff.

Automation and Maintenance

Turning one-off wins into repeatable runs: skills for recurring procedures, scheduled audits, asset production, and the maintenance work that keeps a design codebase healthy.

MCP Integrations and Team Workflows

Connecting Claude Code to the rest of the toolchain over MCP — canvases, browsers, tickets, analytics — and making the whole approach work for a team rather than one enthusiastic designer.

Related material / 03

The sources behind this course.

The course teaches the practice; the books and articles carry the depth, sources, and worked runs it draws on.

Claude Code for Designers

A practical guide for designers who want to work directly with coding agents without turning it into a programming manual.

Screenshot to Implementation Without Losing the Design

A deep workflow for using screenshots as implementation evidence while preserving hierarchy, spacing, states, accessibility, and design-system intent.

Read article

Prototype First, Production Later

A designer-friendly operating model for using agents to explore quickly without accidentally shipping rough prototypes as fragile production code.

Read article

Design Skills: Packaging Taste and Procedure into SKILL.md

When a design procedure deserves to become a SKILL.md, what goes inside one, and how to build, trigger, trust, and share it — with a real skill built for this site's own editorial pipeline, including the part that went wrong.

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MCP for Designers: Connecting Figma, Miro and Your Canvas to an Agent

A plain-language guide to the Model Context Protocol for designers: what it actually is, which design servers are worth connecting today, how to configure them on Claude Code, Codex CLI, OpenCode and Gemini CLI, how to chain a design server with a browser server into a real implementation review, and the permission hygiene that keeps third-party servers from becoming a liability.

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Claude Code for Designers: Zero to First Prototype in One Session

A field note for designers who have never opened Claude Code: install it, log in, write one specific brief, and walk out of the session with a real hero.html you can open in a browser. The walkthrough was executed for this article — including the things the first pass got wrong — and every command carries a verify-before-running caveat because onboarding steps move fast.

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Pricing and Plan Selection for Design Teams

A dated snapshot of what agentic design tooling costs — Claude, ChatGPT/Codex, Google's AI plans, and the bring-your-own-key route — and a usage-pattern heuristic for choosing between them. Every figure was captured on 2026-06-01 and is the most perishable content on this site: verify on the official pricing pages before deciding anything, and expect this page to change as the tool-watch loop re-verifies it.

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