Claude Design

July was not travel-heavy. A week in Trondheim, Norway (a great place to be in Summer) and then the rest of the month at home / Krakow. Ah if you don't count a weekend trip to Spa, Belgium for the F1 GP race. But it was busy preparing for the intense 2nd half of the year. It starts just now, with the Korea Build in Seoul this week followed by the IES26 in Denver, CO, so another RTW trip.

And three presentations to deliver over the next two weeks - the keynote in Seoul, the Bluetooth NLC roadmap in Denver and a joint webinar with US DoE / PNNL / IES on lighting systems integrations.

Three different venues and events, three different topics, so plenty of preparatory work on my end. Add to that the Embedded World America (that is in September) and my days were busy compiling PowerPoint slides. I like doing that, but always the tedious part were illustrations. Text-only slides are boring. Visuals help. But when doing them on my own the results were not that great. And working with a graphic designer was painful - difficult to get the message through and the key aspects often lost or not emphasized enough.

But we have AI now, so I turned to Claude Design (still a beta product) and it really helped. 

I tried AI for slide illustrations before - it was Google Gemini. Unfortunately the cartoonish style of Gemini visuals is not great. And they have too many details. Claude (with some exceptions) is much better. But the most important part is you can feed it the company brand book and other artifacts (fonts, icons) and then it really starts producing output that reflects the corporate identity.

But the conference organizers never give you total freedom. Usually you get a template you have to stick to. And boy - these templates sometimes are terrible.

So:

I'm building a slide deck for the embedded world America conference. The outline is in the attached PDF file. The skeleton presentation is in the attached PPTX file and it is based on the template provided by the conference organizers. I will be asking you to create some illustrations that I will be pasting manually into the PPTX slide deck. 

This deck must use the conference template exactly — its layouts, fonts, and master colors. Within those constraints, apply our brand accents.

As the first step - create graphics for slide 6 illustrating the three stages of development: Bluetooth Low Energy (2010), Bluetooth Mesh Networking (2017) and Bluetooth NLC Profiles (2023). 

Create the illustrations as PNG files with transparent background and store them all as a separate project named "2026 09 Embedded World America".

It cleverly asked me a number of clarifying questions and produced the first figure. Then rinse and repeat. The outcome has been really good. It nicely merged the enforced conference template style sneaking in a good amount of our corporate identity. On top of that I fed it a lot of context pointing to this blog (this is how the content I've accumulated over 20 years really helps - it starts to speak my language). And the resulting slides are probably the best I've ever had. Just me and the machine :)

Also, you just can't stop wondering how Microsoft lost the Office...