Claude Design & MDS
Claude Design is Anthropic’s new AI-driven design generation tool, aimed at producing prototypes, presentations, and UI mockups. With growing interest across the design community, we wanted to clearly assess how well it applies the Maersk Design System in practice, and whether it’s something we can recommend or support today.
Our current assessment
There is real potential in the direction Claude Design is heading. However, in its current research preview state, it is not ready for MDS-supported use.
Today, Claude Design works from an extracted and interpreted understanding of a design system rather than referencing source files directly. For a system like MDS, that distinction is critical.
In practice, this leads to a few recurring issues:
- Tokens, components, spacing, and typography are approximated rather than reproduced accurately
- Output drifts from MDS specifications in ways that are hard to predict or control
Taken together, the resulting deviation from MDS standards is too high for us to recommend Claude Design as a supported approach today.
Our recommendation
For AI-assisted design work using MDS, we recommend continuing with Figma Make.
Figma Make, when used with the MDS Figma Make kit, operates directly on our existing Figma components. Output is generated from the actual source of truth. That direct linkage preserves fidelity to the MDS and significantly reduces the risk of unintended deviation.
What’s next
We’ll continue to evaluate Claude Design as it evolves and will reassess our position as the fidelity gap closes. This space is moving quickly, and we expect tooling to improve.
If you are experimenting with Claude Design independently, we are still keen to hear what you are learning and where you see strengths or limitations in real usage.
— The MDS Team