Design rules that turn a month into an hour
A product catalogue was quoted at a month of InDesign work. The first draft was finished before the meeting that assigned it ended.
what happened
A new product catalogue. The room's working assumption was about a month — that being roughly what it takes to lay out a document like that in InDesign, page by page, with every spec table and product image placed by hand.
A design system already written down as rules a machine could follow, not as a PDF style guide nobody opens. Type scale, colour roles, table treatments, image rules, the lot — set up in Claude Design as constraints rather than descriptions.
I built the first draft while the meeting was still going. Not an outline — a real draft of the document, laid out against the actual rules.
It still needed review, correction and production work. A first draft is a first draft. But the starting line had moved by about four weeks.
why it worked, and it isn't the AI
The speed didn't come from the model. It came from the rules already existing in a form something else could apply.
Most design systems are documents about a design system — a PDF describing what the type scale is, which somebody has to read, remember and then execute by hand every time. That system produces consistency only as a side effect of somebody being careful. Written as constraints instead, the same system produces consistency as a property of the output.
The prompting is a real skill and I'd rather not pretend otherwise. Knowing how to specify a document so the result is usable rather than plausible-looking is the difference between an hour and a week of corrections. But the leverage was in the preparation. If the rules hadn't been written down first, the hour would have produced something that needed throwing away.
the same rules, on CambiumPak
I can't publish my employer's system, so here is the same idea on the invented company — the constraints that let any new CambiumPak document come out correct without a layout decision being made by hand.
Document rules
written as constraints, not descriptions
| rule | what it decides |
|---|---|
| type: one grotesque, two weights | Headings 600, body 400. No display face — a mid-market manufacturer doesn't have one, and pretending otherwise breaks the character. |
| dimensions: internal, mm, L × W × D | Every dimension in every document, in that order. No conversions, no helpful inches. |
| moss = recycled figures only | One accent, one meaning. A moss-coloured number that isn't a recycled percentage is a defect. |
| recycled content is banded | 0–39 / 40–69 / 70–100. Never implied, never a bare number where a band is the claim. |
| badges resolve from the record | Certification marks are looked up per SKU, never placed by hand — and a family row shows only what every member holds. |
| absent means absent | A missing asset is removed, never substituted. A visible gap beats a wrong image. |
Six rules, and five of them settle a question that would otherwise be re-decided on every page of every document. That's where the month goes: not into the layout, into the deciding.
what this says about how I work
- I learn tools as they arrive rather than waiting to see whether they stick. The catalogue was fast because I'd already put the work into a tool most of the room hadn't tried yet.
- I'm not attached to the old way of doing it. I've spent years in InDesign. That's not a reason to spend a month in it.
- The thing I gave back was time — the most expensive and least recoverable resource a small team has. Four weeks of a designer's month, returned to the schedule.
the honest version
A first draft is not a finished document, and I'd be overselling this if I let "an hour" stand without that. It needed review, factual checking against the source data, and production work before it went anywhere. What collapsed was the blank-page phase and the layout phase — which happened to be most of the month.
The employer document and its contents are confidential, so this describes the approach and shows the rules rebuilt on CambiumPak instead. Happy to walk through the actual rule set in a conversation.
open to marketing operations, analytics and martech roles
Let's talk.
Remote, or Albuquerque and hybrid. Happy to walk through the architecture behind any of this.