Build Branded Slides and Documents With Claude Design (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: In this video, I'll show you exactly how to use Cloud Design step-by-step. Now, Cloud Design is an AI that makes your slides, your documents, and other assets look professionally designed even if you're not a designer. I'm David, and we'll start with the basics, like creating PowerPoint slides and Word docs that look great. And then we'll move on to the best part, which is building your own templates so every piece of content you make reflects a single design system, which you can make or import from your brand. And by then, you'll know exactly where Cloud Design can play a role for you. Let's go. Cloud Design lives where you already use Cloud. On both the desktop and the web, you'll see a design button in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen. Click it to start. Now, if you don't see that button, it means you need a paid plan to get in. So the cheapest way is the pro plan at $20 a month. Once you're in, you pick what you want to make. There's a template for just about every kind of asset that you'd want. Clicking a template precedes a prompt for you. It's pretty simple. You click mobile app design. It shows you design a mobile app for fill in the blank. You click slides, make a slide deck about, and so on. Today, I'd like to make a slide deck about introducing a new donut flavor at our donut shop. This prompt is similar to what you'd put into regular Cloud. We describe the task in this first paragraph, the slide outline here in the middle, and some context here at the end. I'll also attach our launch plan for more context. This describes all the content, but for those of us who aren't designers, it can be a struggle to define how you want this to look. I mean, just saying make it look good is probably not gonna do what you want. So in Cloud Design, you pick what it looks like. Under the prompt box, you choose a design system. A design system is a set of rules for what your work should look like and what it shouldn't. For example, this sticker has a design system, but probably not one you like, so let's get rid of it. The fastest way to get started is to pick an existing system, so I'll choose Modernist. You submit the prompt, and you're taken to a new view. Your chat is still on the left, but most of the screen here is dedicated to what Cloud builds. Now, it takes a few minutes, but the nice thing is Cloud starts building it live one slide at a time. When it's done, you can start clicking around to see what it's created. The only thing to watch out for is that it leaves placeholders for images instead of generating them for you. Now, the editor is interactive, so you can click on those placeholders and actually see your images show up. You can even click the strangely small edit button in the top right to reframe the image. Now, building slides takes a lot of iterations to get right, so when a slide misses the mark, you need to tell Cloud. A simple way to do this is to use the comment tool. You can click on an element on the page and then add your comment. Go through the deck, add your comments, and they'll all show up in the left sidebar. Check all the boxes that you'd like to fix and then click send three to Cloud. Cloud will take the feedback and give you a new iteration. This change happens in just a few seconds and gives us a much better looking timeline. This is a full presentation tool, so you can present this straight from Cloud Design. Just click the present button, that's this computer monitor, to go full screen. You navigate with the arrow keys just like a normal presentation. But if you wanna go to PowerPoint or Google Slides, just click the share button in the top right. You can share it as a Cloud artifact, export it to different formats, or even different apps. Okay, so real talk on this. It's not bad if you're starting from scratch, but if you already have a PowerPoint template, I'd stick with that. Cloud, Cloud Cowork, and Cloud Code, plus a PowerPoint template makes a pretty good deck already. But where Cloud Design has actually changed what I do is this next part. You head back to the home screen using the palette icon in the top left. And this time, we'll change a document. Now, you start with documents the same way. You have a template and a prompt to fill in. This time, we're gonna do the thing that most of you need, which is fixing an existing asset, not creating a new one from scratch. Let me show you a document that I wanna change. This is the launch plan we built that PowerPoint from. I'm not a designer, so this is about as pretty as I can make it. Back in Cloud Design, I'll just choose the modernist design system again, and I won't write a prompt at all. I just want Cloud Design to reskin it. Here's what the before and after looks like. This new one looks way better and is basically ready to send. Now, if you wanna edit this, there are three more ways to do it besides comments. Number one is just click this edit pencil icon. You can click any element on the page and its properties appear here on the left side. You can change any property about the text or the container that the text appears in. Number two, you can use pro mode to select several elements at once and change them all together. Third, you can create tweaks. These are controls that flip between two or more different layouts. To give you a sense of what that means, let's tell Cloud to do a two-column layout with slimmed down text. So now you can easily compare multiple options. Here's the two-column layout, and then back to the one column. So Cloud Design makes decent looking documents out of the box, but the real power is taking the style you already have, like colors, fonts, and your overall look, and using that instead. Before we get there, let's solidify what you've learned so far with a new employment offer letter. I made this one with the same modernist design system, and now I can take this document over to today's sponsor, QuickBooks Workforce. I can upload that letter into the new document center. See, Workforce adds a new HR system on top of its classic payroll management. It helped me put together a new job posting, and after sorting through candidate resumes and interviews, I can extend an offer using this template. And it helps me manage my payroll too. Check out QuickBooks Workforce at the link below and get 50% off for three months for a limited time. Now let's take your brand and import it as a design system. Click Design System, and then set up your design system. If you have a code base, you can connect Cloud Code and pull the real fonts, colors, and components straight out of it. Most of us don't though, so click Create here instead. First, give it your company name or your name if you're the brand, and then tell it a little bit about yourself. I'm using the Kevin Cookie Company here, so I'm just taking the description from their website. Next, here's where people get stuck because it asks you for examples of your brand. Don't give up here if you don't have any code. The easiest way to do this is to go to your website, hit Control S to save the webpage down to your local machine then find the files you just saved. There's an HTML file as well as an asset folder. Put the HTML file inside the folder, then drag that folder into the file upload container next to link code from your computer. Once you're done, you can add some more context if you wish, and then click Continue to Generation. Then go get a coffee because congratulations, you've earned it. You come back and you have a complete design system. Your fonts, your colors, your logo, it's pulled out of what your website already does. Your design system is a set of files, which you can access by clicking on this button and then going to All Project Files. Go up to the project level and you can change anything you want here. You can change files directly, ask Claude to edit them, or drop new files down below. Now let's put this design system to work. You'll see it shows up right away for use under the design system dropdown. But let's do something different for the finale. See, every design you create is part of a project and you can scroll down to your projects below the template list. Let's take a look at that employment offer letter I showed you. I started by telling Claude to make an employment offer letter. Then I filled in a few details it asked for. Then I removed some fields and added a placeholder. And then I did the most important thing for this project, which was tell Claude to save my preferences. That saves those settings inside of a file called Claude.md. You might recognize this file as how you save context for ClaudeCowork and ClaudeCode. Now inside the same project, I can click this chat history icon and open a new chat. I'll ask for the letter again, this time after choosing the Kevin Cookie Company design system and a few minutes after I click send and I've got a new form which matches the brand. That's how to use Claude Design to make sharp, professional looking documents. Now don't miss out on 50% off QuickBooks Workforce down below for a limited time and check out the playlist here for more Claude videos. Thanks for watching. I'll see you in the next one.