Turn messy notes into a five-slide Instagram carousel

Get the notes down, however messy

Scribble the idea the way you think it: a heading, a few tips, a line you like, a number worth remembering. Crossed-out bits and arrows are fine. In the reel the notes started "prompt tips??" with "- say the lens", "- light!! (where from)" and "- ONE subject".

If you already know what goes on a slide, write it next to the note ("slide 1", "big quote slide", "dark bg?"). Photograph the page straight on.

Slide 1

Quote slide

Ask Claude to read them back first

Handwriting is where mistakes start, so ask Claude to transcribe the notes and show which note goes on which slide before it designs anything. Correct anything it misread.

Here are my notes for an Instagram carousel. First transcribe them exactly. Then map them to five slides: 1) a list slide with a title that has a number in it and 3 short bullets, 2) a quote slide with one short line, 3) a big-number slide with the number, its unit and one line on why it matters, 4) a checklist of 5 single words, 5) a call-to-action slide. Show it as a table and ask me anything you can't read. Don't invent statistics: if there's no number in my notes, suggest one from them and tell me.

Cut the words to fit

Each slide gets about two seconds of attention. Titles of six words or fewer, bullets of two to four words, a quote of eight words or fewer, one word per checklist row.

Ask Claude to tighten your words, not replace them. It should still sound like you.

Tighten the copy to fit: title 6 words max, bullets 2 to 4 words, quote 8 words max, one word per checklist item, CTA 7 words max with a 1 to 3 word button. Keep my wording and tone where you can. Show me the final words for all five slides before you design them.

Have Claude design the five slides

Ask for exactly 1080 × 1350 per slide and a rhythm of light, dark, colour, light, dark, so each swipe feels different but the set looks like one post. Give it your handle and brand colours if you have them.

The reel used a cream background, near-black, a red-orange accent and a yellow highlight, with a heavy grotesque for headlines and Inter for everything else.

Design the five slides as HTML, each exactly 1080 × 1350. Rhythm: slide 1 light, slide 2 dark, slide 3 in the accent colour, slide 4 light, slide 5 dark. Headlines in Bricolage Grotesque, everything else in Inter. My handle [@HANDLE] bottom left and the page number (1/5) bottom right on every slide. Colours: [YOUR COLOURS or cream #f5f0e6, ink #141414, accent #e0532f, highlight #f6c945]. Show all five side by side in an artifact.

Export the PNGs

In claude.ai, ask for download buttons on the artifact. They use a small open-source library (html-to-image) to save each slide as a PNG at full size. In Claude Code, Claude can save each slide with a headless browser screenshot at exactly 1080 × 1350.

Open one PNG on your phone before posting. If any text is hard to read there, ask for it bigger.

Add a "Download PNG" button under each slide and a "Download all" button. Use html-to-image to export each slide at exactly 1080 × 1350 (the full-size slide, not the scaled preview), named slide-1.png to slide-5.png.

Post them in order

Upload the five PNGs to Instagram as one post, in order, and keep the 4:5 crop. Ask Claude for a short caption if you want one: a hook line, two lines that add something the slides don't say, and the call to action.