Frontend Aesthetics: A Prompting Guide

Claude can generate high-quality frontends, but without guidance it tends toward generic, conservative designs. This guide shows you how to prompt Claude to produce more distinctive, polished output.

Prompting for Better Outputs

Claude has strong knowledge of design principles, typography, and color theory, but defaults to safe choices unless explicitly encouraged otherwise. Through experimentation, we've found three strategies that consistently produce better results:

1. Guide specific design dimensions - Direct Claude's attention to typography, color, motion, and backgrounds individually
2. Reference design inspirations - Suggest sources like IDE themes or cultural aesthetics without being overly prescriptive
3. Call out common defaults - Explicitly tell Claude to avoid its tendency toward generic choices

The prompt below applies these strategies across four key design areas.

The Prompt

To implement these changes, you can append this prompt section to your system prompt or CLAUDE.md file.

Results

Here are the results of UI generations both with and without the prompt section above.

Without guidance, Claude often defaults to simplistic designs with white and purple backgrounds. With the aesthetics prompt, it produces more varied and visually interesting designs.

Example 1: SaaS Landing Page

Prompt: "Create a SaaS landing page for a project management tool"

Example 2: Blog Post

Prompt: "Build a blog post layout with author bio, reading time, and related articles"

Example 3: Admin Table

Prompt: "Create an admin panel with a data table showing users, their roles, and action buttons"

Try It Yourself

First, set up the helper functions:

Generate with the aesthetics prompt:

Isolated Prompting

The full aesthetics prompt works well for general use, but sometimes you want targeted control. You can isolate specific dimensions (typography, color, motion) or lock in a particular theme. This gives you faster generation times and more predictable outputs.

Example 1: Typography Only

Isolate a single design dimension when you want to improve one aspect without changing others:

Example 2: Theme Constraint

Lock in a specific aesthetic when you want consistent theming across generations:

Summary

Claude has strong design capabilities but defaults to safe, generic choices. The techniques in this guide - targeting specific design dimensions, referencing concrete inspirations, and explicitly avoiding common defaults - reliably produce more distinctive output. The full aesthetics prompt works well as a baseline. For more control, use isolated prompts to focus on individual aspects or lock in specific themes across multiple generations.