Why this matters for everything after

From module 2 on, you will be directing Claude constantly — and every direction you give is a critique of what it just made. People who can only say "better, but still off" loop forever. People who can say "the accent appears eleven times; cut it to three" converge in one revision. You will also meet this skill again from the other side: in module 5 you will teach Claude to critique its own screenshots against your rules, using exactly this formula.

What you just learned

The critique formula: element → measurable observation → instruction. A critique written this way is also a working prompt. Numbers beat adjectives: sizes, gaps, counts, contrast — measurable beats "feels off". Five flaw families cover most generated pages: hierarchy, competing accents, spacing, contrast, consistency. Every future prompt you write in this course is a critique of the previous output — precision decides how fast you converge.

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FreeSee like a designer

Critique like a designer

4 min read·Lesson 4 of See like a designer

In the next six minutes you will write your first professional design critique — measurable, specific, and usable as a prompt — on a page with five planted flaws.

"It looks off" is useless — to a designer, and doubly so to Claude. Vague dissatisfaction produces vague revisions. The skill that separates people who get good output from people who get lucky output is measurable feedback: name the element, state what you observe (with a number when possible), and say what to do about it.

Anthropic's own guidance for its design product says exactly this: feedback like "8px of space between the form fields" moves the work; "the spacing looks wrong" moves nothing.

The critique formula

Every line of a useful critique has three parts:

The element. "The hero headline" — not "the top part".
The measurable observation. "is 22px while the section heading below it is 34px" — not "feels small".
The instruction. "Invert the relationship: headline at 48px minimum, section heading at 28px."

Element, observation, instruction. Written that way, a critique is also a prompt — paste it back at Claude and the revision is exactly what you asked for.

The exercise: five flaws

This page has exactly five planted problems. Every one of them is findable with the vocabulary you already have from this module — hierarchy, competing accents, spacing, contrast, consistency. Open the lightbox and study it before reading on.

An Ember Roast page with five deliberate design flaws to find, including broken hierarchy and two competing accent colors — Five flaws. All five are measurable — none of them is a matter of taste.

Write your critique as five lines, each using the formula: element, measurable observation, instruction. Numbers beat impressions — "roughly 4px of gap" is a fine measurement; "cramped" alone is not.

Check it

Five distinct issues are identified, each naming a specific element
Each issue includes a measurable or concretely observable fact (a size, a gap, a count of colors, a contrast judgement) — not just an adjective
Each issue ends with an instruction a developer or Claude could act on without asking a follow-up question

practice

Open Claude Cowork on your own computer and try this on real files. Each module ends with a checkpoint where you submit what you made.

Open in Claude

Module 1 recap