I tried building a presentation in Claude Design

How well did it work? And did I run out of tokens?

Disclosure: This article was written by me, a human, based on my actual experience building presentations in Claude Design over the past week. I tracked token usage throughout this project using Token Buddy for Claude, a tiny browser extension I built to show usage info on any claude.ai page. It’s available on Gumroad, and free for paid subscribers of this newsletter.

TLDR: Claude Design can produce polished presentations, but set up is a lot of work. Skip the Design System and you'll get mediocre results; invest time building one (plus a reusable template) and the output improves dramatically. It’s also a serious token hog, and it could burn through your weekly quota before finishing a single deck. PDF export works well, but PPTX export is still buggy. Bottom line: promising but unfinished, and best suited for text-forward decks where you've already done the brand setup legwork.

The design tool space is crowded and has been for a while. There are lots of all-purpose creative tools for designers of every skill level, including Figma, Canva, and Adobe Creative Cloud. And there are many niche tools like Gamma for presentations, Napkin for charts, and, yes, CarouselBot for carousels and social content. (That one’s mine. I’m biased.)

And now we have Claude design. When Anthropic released it on April 17th, Figma’s stock fell 7% in a single day. Investors are worried that, over the long term, people will interact with software almost exclusively through AI chat interfaces. Instead of dragging, dropping, and clicking, we will only describe what we want to see.

As the operator of a design tool, of course, I was initially both concerned and intrigued. Is Claude Design really a Figma killer? Could it replace Canva and CarouselBot? Based on my preliminary testing, my answer for right now is “probably not.” It’s amazing but also unfinished. And it’s really expensive to operate.

But Claude Design can do so many things that it's difficult to generalize. So I've decided to test it on a variety of different deliverable types and share what I find. This article will be the first in a series.

I’m starting with presentations, because they're something almost everyone has to make and almost nobody enjoys making.

Here’s what I learned.

Don’t do THIS

The proper way to get started with Claude Design is to build a Design System before you kick off any work. But, since you can choose “None” for Design System in the project start window, I suspect many people are giving it a try.

You CAN start a project without a Design System. But should you?

If you’re skipping the Design System, you start by giving your project a name and then supplying content in the form of a file, a group of files, or a link. Once Claude has your content it will ask you to fill out a form designed to help it understand the look and feel you want.

Be prepared for less-than-ideal results

I tried this myself in the interest of science and ended up with a deck that, while not terrible, would have required extensive tweaking and iteration to be truly usable. In this case, it seemed like the model attempted to add some creative flair but struggled to tie it all together into a coherent visual system.

To perform well, Claude Design needs detailed brand context. You can skip it, but you shouldn’t!

How to get an attractive, usable deck

To maximize your chances of getting an attractive deck on the first try: set up your brand, build a first draft, and iterate on your first project. And, once it looks good, turn it into a template you can use over and over again. The first time through can take as long as three hours. After that, it gets faster.

Phase 1: Set up your brand identity (20 minutes to 2 hours)

You start by going to the Design Systems tab and choosing Create.

Choose the Create button to start the process.

Next, Claude will ask you to fill out a detailed form similar to a creative brief.

Complete the form

During this step you will upload your logo, your brand guidelines doc, your preferred fonts, any existing slide decks or documents that represent your visual identity. The more you give Claude Design, the better.

For this exercise, I set up a Design System for my newsletter. To start, I gave Claude a logo and a brand standards doc. This probably wasn’t enough, as I spent almost an hour making corrections to the brand system via chat.

Iterate with Claude until you’re happy with the results

Claude will spend about 5 minutes processing your inputs and using them to build a very comprehensive brand system. It will include kits and standards for a wide range of deliverables and applications.

For best results, you should review every single thing it produced and push back on anything you don’t like. This is the most time-consuming part of the process. Generally speaking, the more guidelines and resources you give Claude up front, the less painful this process will be.

Publish the Design System to use it in projects

Once you’re happy with the design system, publish it by checking the Publish box.

Check the Publish box to make your design system available to projects

Every project you create with the the design system will inherit its settings automatically and have access to any graphic resources you added.

Limitation: Claude Design cannot generate images

If you have an image library, consider adding it to your Design System. One major limitation of Claude Design is that it cannot generate imagery, although it can create charts and simple vector graphics.

Phase 2: Create a deck based on your Design System (20 minutes to 3 hours)

Now for the fun part. When you start a new project, attach your brand system, and Claude Design will automatically use it to inform your designs. Standard prompting best practices apply. Be specific about what you’re building, who it’s for, and what your audience needs to know most.

But keep in mind that you won’t get a perfect result on the first try.

Iterate to get it right.

The first generation is a starting point, not a finished product. You’ll want to go back and forth with Claude a few times. You can ask it to adjust the layout, change the content hierarchy, and move things around.

Try the inline editor

However, iteration can burn up tokens fast. For minor wording and placement adjustments, consider using Claude Design’s inline editor. It’s often faster and less expensive than working through chat.

Be prepared to edit

Earlier this week, before creating presentations for this test, I built a “real” presentation using my personal brand system that I actually used during a Lunch & Learn session with a real company. Getting the deck in really good shape took about three hours altogether.

Don’t forget to create a template

Once you have a presentation you like, you can turn it into a template. This can dramatically increase the quality of the first drafts you get from Claude. You can do this by using the Share button on the editing canvas.

Here’s what happened when I started a new deck based on a template:

Watch your tokens

I have a 20x Max plan, so I usually don’t worry about tokens. But Claude Design is truly voracious.

To track tokens for this test in real time, I built a Chrome extension so I could see my real-time usage information without toggling back to the Settings page all the time.

Claude Design usage is tracked separately, and it’s easy burn through all of it in a single session.

The initial design system setup used 11% of my weekly Claude Design quota. Fine-tuning the brand (adjusting colors, tweaking typography, getting things dialed in) brought me up to 32% of my total. Then creating a deck and working through a few initial edits took me to 41%

Anthropic doesn’t publish exact token counts for Design quotas, but they do say that Max 5x offers 5x the usage of Pro, and Max 20x offers 20x. If we assume Design follows the same ratios (again, not confirmed by Anthropic), that work would have eaten roughly 164% of the Max 5x weekly allowance. On Pro, you’d have blown past your entire weekly quota before you even started your first project.

Your mileage will vary. But the takeaway is: Claude Design is expensive. The time and tokens you spend getting the Design System right and creating templates will save you time and tokens over the long run.

Phase 3: Export and fix

This is where things get a little bumpy. Claude Design’s export options are incomplete.

Export to PDF usually works. The output is clean and the formatting holds up. It can feel a little clunky if you need to make changes after the fact (since, you know, it’s a PDF), but for sharing a finished deck, it does the job.

Export to PPTX is semi-broken. The PowerPoint export doesn’t always preserve the formatting the way you’d expect. In my test, gradients did not appear and at least one image crop was different from what I could see the Claude Design canvas.

This isn’t a dealbreaker, but it does mean that if your final destination is PowerPoint (and for a lot of corporate presentations, it is), budget some time for cleanup.

Also, if your Design System doesn’t include images you’ll also have to source and add them manually in PowerPoint or Keynote.

The bottom line

Claude Design is a promising tool for presentations, but it’s not magic and it’s not finished. The brand system integration combined with templates lets you create something that looks and feels polished. The iteration workflow feels natural if you’re used to working with Claude. But the export capability needs work, especially for PPTX.

If you’re someone who makes presentations regularly, whether for clients, for internal teams, or for your own business, it’s worth spending the time to set up your brand and build that first template. For certain projects, especially decks with lots of data points and less imagery, it could save you some time.

Next up in this series, I’ll be testing Claude Design on LinkedIn carousels. Stay tuned.

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p.s., If you want to access your token usage from Claude Design, you can get my Token Buddy extension, which is free for paid subscribers of this newsletter, or you can use this prompt with Claude Code to build your own:

Prompt: Build a Chrome extension that tracks Claude token usage

Build a Chrome MV3 extension that shows live Claude token usage and overage spend on every claude.ai page.

Core feature: a floating “pill” at the top-right of any claude.ai page that shows whichever usage metric is closest to its limit (as a %). Clicking the pill opens a panel with the full breakdown — progress meters for every limit, reset countdowns, and the exact dollar overage spent since the session started. The pill’s color shifts neutral → amber (60%+) → red (85%+).

Where the data comes from (the key intel)

Claude’s web client fetches usage from an authenticated JSON endpoint:

GET https://claude.ai/api/organizations/{orgId}/usage

where {orgId} is the user’s org UUID, available via GET https://claude.ai/api/organizations (returns an array of {uuid, ...}). The /usage response looks like:

json

{
  "five_hour":         { "utilization": 34.0, "resets_at": "2026-04-23T17:50:00+00:00" },
  "seven_day":         { "utilization": 18.0, "resets_at": "…" },
  "seven_day_omelette":{ "utilization": 100.0,"resets_at": "…" },   // Claude Design 7-day
  "seven_day_sonnet":  { "utilization":  0.0, "resets_at": "…" },   // may be null/0
  "seven_day_opus":    null,                                          // may be null
  "extra_usage": {
    "is_enabled":    true,
    "monthly_limit": 5000,      // minor units (cents for USD)
    "used_credits":  1856.0,    // minor units
    "utilization":   37.12,     // percent
    "currency":      "USD"
  }
}

utilization is 0–100. used_credits and monthly_limit are in minor units (divide by 100 for USD). The omelette name appears because Claude Design’s internal codename is “Omelette”.

Architecture

• MV3 manifest, host_permissions: ["https://claude.ai/*"]

• Isolated-world content script on claude.ai/*: renders the pill + panel, reads chrome.storage.local for cached URL, actively fetches /api/organizations → /api/organizations/{uuid}/usage on first load using fetch(url, { credentials: 'include' }) so it authenticates via the user’s Claude cookies.

• Main-world content script ("world": "MAIN") on claude.ai/* at document_start: monkey-patches window.fetch to also catch the /usage response opportunistically when Claude’s own app fetches it (e.g. during Settings → Usage). When it sees the usage-shaped JSON, it postMessages a snapshot to the isolated world and kicks a 60-second refresh loop.

• Background service worker: handles a chrome.commands keyboard shortcut (Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+U) that sends a toggle message to the active tab’s content script.

• Popup: toggles pill visibility (stored in chrome.storage.local) and links to chrome://extensions/shortcuts.

Session cost (the useful metric)

On the first snapshot, cache extra_usage.used_credits as a baseline. On every subsequent snapshot, currentUsedCredits - baseline (divided by 100 for USD) is the exact overage spend since the session started. Provide a “Reset session” button in the panel that re-baselines.

Pill summarizer

From the latest snapshot, build an array of candidates (Design 7-day, Overage, 5-hour, 7-day overall, and model-specific 7-day if > 0), pick the one with highest utilization, show its label + rounded %. Special states: “Idle —” before first snapshot, “All clear 0%” when all meters are zero.

Error handling

Wrap every chrome.* call in a try/catch and listen for unhandledrejection to silently swallow “Extension context invalidated” errors — these happen when the extension updates while a content script is still running.

Legal

The listing copy should clearly state “Unofficial; not affiliated with Anthropic” since “Claude” is an Anthropic trademark. Use nominative-fair-use form — product name first, then “for Claude” as a descriptor.

Stack recommendation

TypeScript + Vite + @crxjs/vite-plugin for MV3 HMR. Keep the whole extension under 20 KB gzipped.