Rebuilt my portfolio homepage in Claude Design and pushed it live: 3D assets, motion, and how little it now costs to try a direction.
The first thing I rebuilt was my own portfolio homepage. Designed and built in Claude Design, then pushed live. It's the page this log links back from, not a mockup of one. Nothing was redrawn or rebuilt in between.
The expensive part of visual design has always been the distance between an idea and something you can actually judge. That distance is now close to nothing.
I wanted it to be the opposite of a systems exercise. Expressive, a bit indulgent, the kind of thing you build when nobody is asking you to justify a component. Three-dimensional assets built in the same environment as the interface, so they share its material and its light rather than being dropped in from somewhere else. Motion that responds to you: cursor-follow, parallax on scroll, slow rotation that keeps the page alive when you stop moving.
None of that is system work. It's look and feel, composition, pacing, the decision about how much movement is too much, and that still comes down to taste and a lot of nudging. What changed is how many versions of it I could look at. Try a direction, see it moving and full-size in the browser, throw it away the same afternoon. The expensive part of visual design has always been the distance between an idea and something you can actually judge. That distance is now close to nothing.