How to Design Your Substack with Claude (Headers, Dividers, and a Full Design System in Minutes)

My Substack has custom headers, dividers, and graphics that match my brand exactly, and the design direction for all of it came out of Claude in about 5 minutes. Here's the exact process, including the prompt.

First, the honest setup: I didn't start from nothing. My creative director had already built the Audrey Automates brand: guidelines, logos, icons, fonts, colors. What she didn't have time for was the supplementary stuff, and Substack assets are exactly the kind of supplementary stuff that's valuable to the business but a genuinely bad use of a senior designer's day. That's the gap this process fills: it extends the direction your designer already set into every surface she didn't have time to touch.

Step 1: Put your brand guidelines somewhere Claude can read

Mine live in a folder Claude can access (the same folder my whole business runs from; the full setup is in my second brain guide). At minimum you need your brand guidelines PDF or a folder with your fonts, colors, and logo files. If a designer never made you guidelines, even a one-pager listing your hex codes and fonts changes the output completely.

Step 2: Show it what it's designing FOR

This is the move most people skip. Before asking for any design, I pointed Claude at my actual Substack content: the published articles and the drafts for upcoming weeks. Now it knew my structure, my sections, where dividers actually fall, and what the headers need to do. Design direction built on your real content fits your real content.

Step 3: Ask for the design direction as an artifact

Here's the prompt pattern I used, adapted so you can run it as-is:

My brand guidelines are in [folder/attached]. Go read my Substack
articles in [folder/links] to get a sense of our structure and copy.

With that, create a mockup of what our Substack design should look
like: headers, dividers, buttons, and any other recurring graphics.
Make it an artifact I can reference while creating the assets.

What came back was a complete visual spec: every recurring element mocked up, in my colors and fonts, with notes on sizing and usage. Five minutes, and it was beautiful.

Step 4: Turn the direction into assets

The artifact is the instruction set. From there you (or a VA, or a junior designer) produce the actual image files against a spec instead of a vibe, which is the difference between one round of production and five. Upload them in Substack's settings and you're done.

The takeaway that matters: these models do exceptional work when they have strong direction to work from. I know my weaknesses. I have great creative vision and I'm not the person to put it on paper, so a senior designer sets the direction once, and Claude runs it out across every surface she doesn't have time for. If you want the bigger version of this same move, here's how the website got built the same way.

FAQ

Do I need a designer first? No, but you need direction from somewhere: at minimum your colors, fonts, and logo written down. The stronger the guidelines, the better the output; weak direction gets you a generic design.

What's an artifact? Claude's side-panel document format: a standalone piece of work (a mockup, a doc, a page) you can keep, reference, and iterate on outside the chat scroll. More in Claude 101.

Can Claude make the final image files too? It gives you the complete spec and mockup; producing final exported graphics is still a person-plus-tool job. The spec is what makes that production fast.

Does this work for something other than Substack? Yes. Same process for email templates, workbook layouts, slide templates: guidelines in, real examples of the content in, artifact of design direction out.

Draft notes (internal, strip before publish)

• Prompt is reconstructed from Audrey's on-camera description in take 0010 ("go into the files with all of the Audrey Automates newsletters to get a sense of structure, access the brand guidelines... mock up what the design for our Substack should look like. Make sure to think about headings, dividers, buttons"). Have her confirm or paste the actual prompt if she wants it verbatim.
• Candidate to double as a Substack post per her July 8 note; if so, publish there first and mirror here for the ManyChat link.
• Screenshots needed at publish: the artifact Claude returned, and a before/after of the Substack.