I am not a graphic designer. I have said so on the show more than once, and I meant it both times. For years, my process was to open Canva, scroll until something looked less bad than everything else, and drop my text into it.
So when image generation got good, it looked like the answer. Describe the thing, receive the thing, ninety seconds, done. The trouble is that the thing arrives finished. You want the headline two points bigger, and now you are negotiating with a model that moves something else every time you ask.
Then the platforms started attaching labels. That little tag naming your post as AI content shows up on the one piece of the week where you wanted someone thinking about your product instead of your production method. You saved an hour and bought a conversation you did not want to have.
Peg Fitzpatrick found the way around it, and the way around it is not a trick. She simply stopped asking for an image.
What she asks for instead
Peg runs marketing for a company that sells industrial textile care products, which is to say she is in-house, she is accountable for the brand, and she does not get to experiment on it. Her rule is absolute. No AI-generated imagery for a brand she is responsible for.
What she built instead is a Claude skill that produces a campaign and then hands the design work to Canva as a Canva file. Claude writes the captions, the story copy, the Pinterest fields, and the LinkedIn variations. Then it creates actual Canva designs, with every element still editable, and Peg opens them and finishes them herself.
That sounds like a small distinction. It is the whole thing. A generated image is a finished artifact with provenance attached to it. A Canva design is a document, and Peg is the one who lays the photographs into it.
She has been running campaign graphics this way for a couple of months. In that time, she has downloaded every one of them and seen no AI label on any of them.
I want to be careful here, because Peg was careful. She says plainly that she is not an AI design expert. Her reading of the mechanism is that a generated design arrives flat with data on the back end naming the tool that produced it, while a Canva document does not. That part is her reasoning. What she observes is narrower and more useful than any theory: she edits in Canva, she adds her own photos, and the files come out clean.
The mechanics, start to finish
You need two things connected before anything runs. A Claude account with the Canva connector authorised, and a Canva account. Peg checks the connector first every single time, which tells you how often it needs checking.
Then you need the skill. A skill in Claude is a set of instructions you write once, and Claude pulls it in when the work matches, even when you do not call it by name. Peg asked for a campaign for a fictional yarn shop without naming the skill, and Claude used it anyway.
What goes inside the skill is the part worth copying. Peg wrote down the brand voice. She wrote a what-to-avoid list: not too many emojis, and do not let it read like a marketing template, because she wants the copy to sound organic. She described the business and what it sells and who buys it. She listed the calls to action she actually uses, down to class registration for the weeks she is running a class.
Then she specified the output, platform by platform. Two to three Instagram captions. Five Instagram story graphics, each with a different intro so the text does not repeat across a week. A rule for how many hashtags and what the mix should be. Pinterest pin titles, descriptions, overlay text, and keywords. Two to three LinkedIn variations with their own hashtags. Then the Canva design sizes she wants back.
One instruction in that list is worth the price of the whole episode. She told the skill to tell her whether the campaign has an end date, because a Pinterest pin promoting a sale keeps working long after the sale closes, and somebody has to pause it or point it somewhere else. No model knows to warn you about that. Peg knew, so she wrote it down.
The brief she runs through is short. The offer, the campaign goal, the core message, the creative direction. For the demo, she added hex values for the brand colors, because the shop was invented for the recording and she did not want the skill reaching for her own Canva Brand Kit. For her real work, she says that section would not be there at all. Worth noting, since you would reasonably assume the Brand Kit was doing the heavy lifting. On this recording, it was not.
She hits enter and the full campaign lands in about two minutes. Copy, Pinterest sets, LinkedIn text, and Canva previews rendered right in the chat. Click one, and it opens in Canva.
Where it breaks
I asked Peg what usually sends a design back for another pass. She said nothing does. Once the files are in Canva, she never sends them back; she just edits from there.
That is not the same as saying the output is perfect, and she did not pretend otherwise. The designs come back without telling you which platform size each one is. She would like one labelled as an Instagram story and the next labelled as a Pinterest pin, and it does not do that yet, so she opens the resize panel and reads the dimensions before downloading anything. It also used to leave the brand name off the designs entirely, which it has since stopped doing.
Her finishing pass is the same every time. Open each design, swap in her own photographs, adjust a few things, download. The files go into an Agorapulse library where she matches them against the captions.
Two honest gaps. The no-label result is her experience across a couple of months on her own accounts, not a guarantee any platform has made, and platform detection changes without notice. And we never discussed what any of this costs, so I am not going to tell you.
The full episode has her walking through the skill on screen, which is the fastest way to see how little is in it.
What this is really about
Peg said something near the end that I have not stopped thinking about. Her words, not mine: “The expertise is not baked into the AI. Just, it’s not. The expertise is you.”
She started in social media strategy in 2010, when there was no book explaining how to build a campaign, and she had to work out the timing herself. Fifteen years later, that working out is what she loads into a skill file. The Pinterest end-date flag is not a Claude capability. It is a scar.
And this is why her graphics do not look like the three hair salons in her town that are all posting the same green infographic. Those businesses did not make a bad tool choice. They handed over the part of the job that was theirs.
So when the next tool arrives, and it will, ask a different question than the one everyone else asks. Not what can this generate for me. Ask which step of my process I am about to hand over, and whether I actually want that step back.
