Claude Skills Explained: The Ultimate Guide to Building, Using, and Mastering AI Workflows

How to Enable Claude Skills

Before using Skills, you must enable them in your settings:

1. Go to Settings in Claude
2. Navigate to Capabilities
3. Toggle on Skills (and other capabilities if desired)

Once enabled, a table of available Skills appears—both pre-built by Anthropic and any custom ones you’ve uploaded.

Using Pre-Built Anthropic Skills: A Practical Example

Anthropic provides ready-to-use Skills like Brand Guidelines, which applies Anthropic’s official colors, typography, and layout to outputs.

Step-by-Step: Summarizing an Annual Report with Brand Guidelines

1. Toggle on the Brand Guidelines Skill under Capabilities
2. Start a new chat
3. Prompt: “Please summarize the Nvidia annual report for 2025. Use the Brand Guidelines skill. [Link to report]”

Claude automatically recognizes this as a reporting task and structures the output with:

• Clean title
• Summary sections
• Formatted bullet points
• Anthropic’s signature color scheme and typography

The result is a professional, visually consistent document that clearly reflects Anthropic’s brand identity.

Limitations with PowerPoint Generation

When asked to create a PowerPoint deck from the same summary, Claude produced a text-heavy slide deck with no charts, graphs, or visual elements.

Why? Because LLMs struggle with non-textual outputs. While you can prompt for visuals, the results won’t match consulting-grade slides. For advanced design, consider specialized AI tools—but for text-based reports, Claude excels.

Building Your Own Custom Skill: A Step-by-Step Tutorial

You don’t have to rely on Anthropic’s templates. You can create a custom Skill that mirrors your personal or company branding.

Use Case: “Ali’s Brand Skill”

In the tutorial, Ali creates a Skill based on his Gamma presentation template. The goal: teach Claude to replicate his brand’s visual style, tone, and communication principles.

Step 1: Prepare Your Prompt

Your prompt must instruct Claude to generate a Skill file. Key elements to include:

• Skill name: e.g., “Ali’s Brand Skill”
• Reference file: Upload a sample deck or document that embodies your brand
• Design instructions: Colors, spacing, typography, visual hierarchy
• Communication principles: e.g., top-down structure, pyramid principle, conciseness
• Content rules: “Lead with ‘So What?’”, “Prefer showing over telling”, “End with clear next steps”
• Formatting requirements: Ensure the output complies with Skill file standards

Example prompt snippet:

“Create a skill called Ali’s Brand Skill. Reference and analyze the attached PowerPoint to extract brand visuals, slide structure, and communication patterns. Apply exact styling, color palette (green/teal primary, orange/coral accents), and layout. Always lead with implications (‘So What?’). Use diagrams over paragraphs where possible. End sections with clear next steps.”

Step 2: Upload Your Reference File

Attach your brand reference (e.g., a PowerPoint deck) when submitting the prompt. This file becomes part of the Skill’s context.

Step 3: Generate and Download the Skill

Claude returns three outputs:

1. Skill Markdown File (.md) – the core instruction set
2. Brand Analysis Summary – breakdown of extracted design elements
3. Installation Guide – troubleshooting and setup tips

Download the ZIP file containing these assets.

Step 4: Install Your Custom Skill

1. Go to Settings > Capabilities
2. Click Upload Skill
3. Select your ZIP file (must contain exactly one Skill at root level)

Your custom Skill now appears in the list, labeled with your name and description.

Testing Your Custom Skill: Real-World Results

Ali tested his custom Skill by summarizing the same Nvidia annual report:

• The output used green/teal text and matched his tone (action-oriented, implication-first)
• However, orange accents appeared—traced back to peach/orange highlights in his original reference deck

This highlights a key insight: your reference file directly shapes the Skill’s behavior. If your sample lacks variety, the Skill may be limited in scope.

PowerPoint Output with Custom Skill

The generated deck followed Ali’s brand colors and structure but remained text-heavy and suffered from layout issues (e.g., title text overflowing slide boundaries).

Again, this confirms: LLMs are strongest with text, weakest with visual design.

Understanding the Skill File Structure

At its core, a Skill is a Markdown (.md) file containing structured instructions. When you inspect Ali’s custom Skill file, you’ll find:

• Metadata: Name, description, version
• Execution steps: Ordered actions Claude should follow
• Brand analysis: Extracted color palette, typography, layout patterns
• Slide templates: Decomposed versions of each reference slide as reusable blocks
• Communication rules: Top-down structure, conciseness, action orientation

This modular design allows precise control—but also means missing slide types in your reference will limit output flexibility.

Using Community Skills from GitHub

Why build from scratch when others have shared proven Skills? The best repository for community Skills is GitHub.

How to Find and Download Community Skills

1. Search GitHub for “Claude Skills” repositories
2. Look for repos with:
   • A README.md explaining the Skill
   • A .md Skill file
   • Optional supporting files
3. Download options:
   • Entire repo: Click “Code” > “Download ZIP”
   • Individual Skill: Open the .md file > Click “Download”

Preparing Community Skills for Upload

Claude requires Skills to be in a ZIP file with exactly one Skill at the root.

If you download a single .md file:

1. Create a new folder
2. Name it (e.g., “image-enhancer”)
3. Place the .md file inside
4. Compress the folder into a ZIP

Now you can upload it via Settings > Capabilities > Upload Skill.

Testing a Community Skill: Image Enhancer Example

Ali tested a community “Image Enhancer” Skill:

• Uploaded a low-quality thumbnail image
• Prompted: “Use the image enhancer skill to improve the quality of the attached picture to 4K.”
• Result: Slightly sharper image—better than expected, though not true 4K upscaling

While not perfect, it demonstrated that even non-text Skills can yield usable results.

Critical Security Warning: Skill Injection Risks

Just like “Comet jacking” in Perplexity, public Skills can pose security risks.

Malicious actors could embed harmful instructions in community Skills that:

• Access sensitive data via MCPs
• Trigger unintended actions
• Phish for information

Always review Skill files before uploading. Check the Markdown content for suspicious commands, external URLs, or unexpected tool usage.

Top 3 Best Practices for Reliable Claude Skills

1. Toggle Off Unused Skills

Keeping unused Skills enabled:

• Wastes tokens
• Slows down execution
• Risks conflicting instructions

Solution: Only enable the Skills you’re actively using in a session.

2. Avoid Duplicate Intent

Don’t enable both “Anthropic Brand Guidelines” and your custom “Ali’s Brand Skill” simultaneously. Overlapping instructions can cause:

• Color conflicts (e.g., orange from Anthropic mixing with your green)
• Formatting inconsistencies
• Unpredictable output

Solution: Use one brand Skill at a time. Toggle others off.

3. Iterate on Your Skills

If your Skill doesn’t behave as expected:

1. Review the Brand Analysis Summary
2. Refine your reference file or prompt
3. Regenerate the Skill

Claude can even debug its own Skill file—if upload fails, ask it to fix formatting errors based on the error message.

Advanced Skill Ideas Beyond Branding

Your Skills don’t have to be about design. Get creative with repeatable workflows:

• Product Validation Skill: Run new ideas through your standard validation checklist
• Social Media Post Generator: Analyze past posts, identify top-performing topics, generate new content in your voice
• Competitor Analysis Skill: Structure SWOT analyses using your internal framework
• Meeting Notes to Action Items: Auto-convert transcripts into tracked tasks

The only limit is your imagination—and the task’s suitability for text-based AI.

When to Use Claude Skills vs. Other AI Tools

Claude Skills shine in structured, text-heavy, repeatable tasks. They are less ideal for:

• Complex data visualization
• High-fidelity graphic design
• Real-time data manipulation (unless paired with MCPs)

For those, consider specialized tools—but use Claude Skills to handle the narrative, structure, and logic layers.

Troubleshooting Common Skill Issues

Future of Claude Skills: Community and Ecosystem Growth

As more users share Skills on GitHub, expect to see:

• Industry-specific templates (finance, legal, marketing)
• Integration-focused Skills (Slack, Notion, Airtable)
• Curated Skill marketplaces

Early adopters who master Skill creation will gain a significant productivity edge.

Final Thoughts: Why This Changes Everything

Claude Skills represent a shift from one-off prompts to reusable, intelligent workflows. By encapsulating your processes, tone, and standards into modular instructions, you turn Claude into a true extension of your team.

While not perfect for every use case, they dramatically improve consistency, speed, and quality for text-based deliverables—reports, analyses, summaries, and structured content.

Action Plan: Get Started Today

1. Enable Skills in Claude Settings > Capabilities
2. Test a pre-built Skill (e.g., Brand Guidelines)
3. Create your first custom Skill using a brand reference file
4. Explore GitHub for community Skills in your domain
5. Apply best practices: toggle unused Skills off, avoid duplicates, iterate

As Ali Salam says: “The world is your oyster.” With Claude Skills, you’re not just using AI—you’re teaching it to work like you.

Claude Skills Explained: The Ultimate Guide to Building, Using, and Mastering AI Workflows

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