Making Slides From Screenshots

I’m starting to chat with Series A–C founders about my next fractional design leadership role.*

For one of those chats, I wanted a slide showing the range of problems and the quality bar at a recent client.

The problem was, I had no Figma files, no screenshots, and couldn’t even log into the app. To be clear, the UI isn’t my work and I’m not passing it off as such. It’s a prop for a conversation.

So I set myself a challenge: could I build it without opening Figma at all? Here’s how it went with Claude, and some tricks I picked up along the way:

1️⃣ Start with what’s public

I asked Claude to research the product’s UI from my time there, using press releases, launch posts and app store listings, and pull it into slide layouts. The results were decent-ish: a starting point, not an answer.

2️⃣ Screenshot what you can reach

Sign-up and the logged-out mobile web experience were available to me. I then had Claude strip out the browser chrome and upsell banners so the mobile web screens read like the app. They’re built in React Native and almost identical anyway, so it became one coherent journey rather than a hodgepodge of platforms.

3️⃣ Try 10 layout variants

Should it be six screens showing a full journey, or a couple of app screens next to desktop? I asked Claude to generate 10 layout options using a range of different screens until I found the right balance. I landed on the one that held the story I wanted to tell: dense information on a small screen, and when to go custom versus sticking with standard platform conventions.

4️⃣ Bring it to life

Once I was happy with the layout, I wanted to add a subtle bit of motion to the slide, so I asked Claude for help again. Now this part was really neat. Claude trimmed the start and end off a screen recording I made, and then applied frame-by-frame tweaks to the scroll behaviour to make the experience feel more like a native app than mobile web.

All in all, I’m pretty pleased with the result. This sort of thing used to mean hours fiddling with the details. This time, most of my effort went on deciding what the slide was for. Claude made 10 layouts that all looked finished, so it was on me to notice which ones mattered to the problems I wanted to speak to, and which were just visual fluff for the sake of it.

Oh, and of course, I did almost all of this from my phone.

* If you’re a Series A–C startup, scaling your team and need a design leader a few days a week, my DMs are open, or check out intentional.partners