Claude (Fable 5.1) is still pretty bad at design. It seems incapable of handling
By Kevinborders · October 31, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
Claude (Fable 5.1) is still pretty bad at design. It seems incapable of handling margins/spacing, proportion, and visual consistency between elements.
V1 at the bottom had worse iterations before it, and this is after telling it to clean up a lot of stuff.
V2 is after I gave it verbal instructions to simplify the bottom design, which it partly did, but in a way that looks ridiculous to any human.
Like why have an enormous gap between the middle elements when the left element spacing is so small? Why use straight lines on the right when the left uses curved lines? Isn't that chart wider relative to its height than any chart you've ever seen? Why have blue backgrounds and gray dotted lines on the left and solid lines with white backgrounds on the right? The middle captions don't line up. The table cells don't have enough padding.
V3 took micromanaging Claude for about 30 minutes, pointing out all these issues and giving it exact pixel numbers in many cases.
When you have something in a box, the padding should be the same on all sides. When you have four things in a line, they should be evenly spaced.
This shouldn't have to go in the CLAUDE md file, it should be part of the training.
I wonder how much Anthropic just isn't trying to make Claude good at design, and how much is fundamentally harder than training it to write code?
For what it's worth, I also feel like most of the code Claude writes looks more like V1 than V3 -- it just doesn't matter because it works and customers won't see it.