Make Sunday's Slides Without A Human Graphic Designer On Staff Or Volunteer

AI for Church Leaders | Claude Design, Part 1 of 2

Hey there!

Anthropic opened a real design tool to every paid Claude account back in April, and most church teams still have not opened it once.

It’s called Claude Design. It lives at claude.ai/design and in the sidebar of the Claude desktop app.

If you pay for Pro, Max, Team, or Enterprise, you already have access. Enterprise accounts need an admin to switch it on first. It runs off the same usage allowance as your normal Claude chats, so there is no new invoice and nothing extra to track.

Claude Pro costs $20 a month. Anthropic keeps stacking entire products onto that base tier without touching the price. A design tool your communications volunteer would otherwise pay for separately now comes bundled into the cheapest paid plan, which makes $20 the easiest line item in your ministry tech budget to defend.

One caveat before you open it. Anthropic still calls this a research preview. Translation: they shipped it early on purpose and they expect you to hit rough edges.

Here’s the setup. Chat sits on the left side of your screen. A canvas sits on the right. You describe what you want in plain English, Claude builds it, and then you correct it three ways: by talking to it, by clicking one element and leaving a comment on it, or by dragging things around on the canvas yourself.

Today I’m giving you the first 3 things to build, ordered by how fast you get a win. Next week I’ll cover 3 projects with higher leverage.

Let’s start with the one you need every seven days.

1. Start with next Sunday’s announcement slides.

Time: 15 minutes. Export: .pptx

Start here because you already know the content. The only variable you’re testing is the tool.

Open claude.ai/design and upload a recent slide deck as a .pptx file, or a screenshot of a slide you liked. Claude reads the typography, the color, and the layout logic out of whatever you upload.

Then write one prompt with four ingredients in it:

Reference: Use the type and color from the attached deck. Content: [paste your actual announcements, dates and all] Format: 16:9, 5 slides, one announcement per slide. Constraint: Body text large enough to read from the back row of a 400-seat room.

Claude builds the set in under two minutes.

This is where it stops behaving like an image generator. Click on a headline that runs too long and leave an inline comment: “shorten this and bump the size 20 percent.” Claude fixes that element and leaves your other four slides alone.

It also builds you sliders for spacing, color, and layout, so you can nudge padding without having to describe padding in words.

Then: export as .pptx and drop it into whatever your booth runs on Sunday morning.

2. Rebuild last year’s event signage from a photo of it.

Time: 1 hour for a full set. Export: PDF

Your church reprints roughly the same signs every year. Most of them were designed once, by someone who has since moved away.

Walk the building with your phone and photograph the six you reprint most:

• Guest parking
• Kids check-in
• Welcome desk
• Nursery
• Next steps
• Your fall event

Upload one photo into Claude Design and prompt it like this:

Recreate this sign clean and modern. Same information, new date of October 18. Fix the visual hierarchy so the date and location are readable from 20 feet. Keep our logo colors.

What comes back is your own sign, in your own colors, reorganized so a driver can read it at 15 miles an hour. Run the same prompt across all six photos in one sitting.

Then: export each one as a PDF and send the folder to your print shop. If your team would rather finish inside a familiar tool, Claude Design pushes straight into Canva, Adobe, Miro, or Vercel. It also exports standalone HTML, .zip, or a link scoped to your organization.

That one hour replaces the annual scramble where somebody reprints last year’s sign with a sticker over the date.

3. Make the volunteer signup flyer match your existing brand.

Time: 20 minutes. Export: 4 sizes at once

Your congregation notices brand inconsistency without ever being able to name it. Most church communication fails right here.

The automatic brand system has a catch for churches. Anthropic built it to read a company’s codebase and design files. Your church has neither.

So you build the brand reference by hand, which takes about four minutes. In a fresh Claude Design conversation, upload three things:

• Your logo file
• A screenshot of your website homepage
• A recent bulletin PDF

Then tell Claude:

Treat these three files as our brand standard. Pull the exact colors, the fonts, and the general spacing from them for everything in this conversation.

There’s also a web capture tool inside Claude Design that grabs elements straight off a live page. That works well on your own website.

Now build the flyer. Give Claude the ministry name, the specific ask, the time commitment, and the signup method.

Once the design is right, ask for it in four sizes without redesigning anything: print half-sheet, Instagram square, story vertical, and lobby screen. That one request saves your volunteer the hour they normally spend resizing by hand, which is where these projects usually die.

Then: your recruiting graphic looks like it came from the same organization as your website, because it did.

Your assignment before next Sunday.

Pick one. I’d start with the announcement slides, because the content is already written and you’ll have a finished export inside 15 minutes.

Two things to expect:

• Collaboration is basic. It’s not fully multiplayer yet, so treat it as a solo drafting station that hands off to your team.
• Research preview means research preview. Expect a layout every so often that needs a second pass.

My read: this is a drafting station. Your designer still finishes the work. What changes is that they now start at 80 percent on a Tuesday afternoon.

Next week, Part 2: turning your last board report into a one-pager people finish, prototyping the web page your team keeps debating, and the handoff that gets your volunteer team building without you.

Reply and tell me which of the 3 you tried. I read every response.

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