Design on the Canvas with Claude Code: The Complete Guide

Your coding agent already writes your code, your tests, and your docs. It should be able to make the design work too — the landing page, the pitch deck, the diagram, the vector mark. With Clearly connected to Claude Code over MCP, it can.

This is not "Claude writes CSS." It is Claude driving a real design canvas: creating compositions, laying out spec-correct blocks, generating editable vectors, and reading the canvas back to check its own work. The output is real, editable layers you (or your teammates) can open and refine — the same surface a human designer uses.

Here is the complete workflow.

The idea: the canvas as an alternate view of your work

A codebase and a design file usually live in two different worlds. Clearly closes that gap by exposing the canvas as a tool your agent can call. From inside Claude Code, the canvas becomes another surface your agent operates — like the filesystem or the terminal, but for design.

That unlocks things a code-only agent cannot do: a real landing page laid out on an 8pt grid, a themed deck, a brand board, an editable SVG mark — produced in the same session where you are building the product.

Step 1: Connect the Clearly MCP server to Claude Code

Clearly ships an MCP server. Adding it to Claude Code takes one command — see the exact connect string in our MCP docs and the Claude Code setup guide.

Once it is connected, run the Claude Code command to list MCP tools and you will see the Clearly design tools appear alongside your other servers. That is Claude's design palette.

Step 2: Give it a brief

Now just ask. Claude Code translates your brief into canvas calls. For example:

"Create a new composition and design a dark-mode landing page for an AI code-review tool — nav, hero, a three-column feature grid, and a closing CTA. Indigo accent."

Behind the scenes Claude creates a composition, sets the canvas theme, and composes each block. Because Clearly's compose primitives carry a real type scale, 8pt spacing, and theme-matching, the result is a designed page — not a stack of raw text boxes. Every block lands as editable layers.

You can be just as direct about other formats:

• A deck: "Build a six-slide seed deck — title, problem, solution, a big traction stat, market, and the ask."
• A one-pager: "Write a product one-pager for a real-time presence API — positioning, three features, a pricing note, and a CTA."
• Vector art: "Draw a minimal geometric fox mark in one accent color for an app icon."

Step 3: Let it see its own work

The difference between an agent that guesses and an agent that designs is feedback. Clearly lets Claude perceive the canvas — it can read the scene back as structured data (every node, its position, style, and text) or as a rendered image of exactly what is on screen.

So Claude can check its own layout, notice that a section overflows or a color is off, and fix it — the same loop a designer runs. Ask it to "check the layout and tighten the spacing" and it will perceive, adjust, and re-verify.

Step 4: Open it and take over

When Claude is done, open the composition in the Clearly canvas. Everything it made is editable — move a section, change a color, swap the copy. Nothing is flattened or locked. The agent did the blocking-out; you do the taste pass.

Because the tools persist headless, none of this requires you to have the canvas open while Claude works. Open it when you want to look.

Why this beats "design in code"

You could ask an agent to hand-write HTML and hope it looks right. Designing on the canvas instead gives you three things code generation does not:

1. Real design primitives. Type scale, spacing, hierarchy, and theming are baked into the compose tools, so quality does not depend on the model getting every pixel right.
2. Editable output. The result is layers a designer can refine, not a wall of markup to reverse-engineer.
3. A shared surface. The canvas is the same one your team and your other agents use — one place the work lives, whether a human or an agent made it.

Where to go next

• Read the MCP server docs for the exact connect command.
• Prefer a free model? See how to run Clearly on your own Gemini, OpenRouter, or Codex key.
• Want the vector side? Here is how to create editable vector art with AI.

Start free with Clearly → — connect Claude Code and let your agent design.