Ask an image generator for an app illustration and you get a picture: pixels, no shapes to select, and a flat image that tends to sit on the screen like a stock photo. It is rarely part of the layout.
The brief in a test we ran asked for the opposite: "custom illustrations, silhouette based visuals, and decorative graphic elements integrated naturally into the interface." That only works when the drawings and the interface share shapes, colors and frames.
Drawing versus generating
A model can write SVG, a text format that describes shapes by their coordinates. Drawing well that way is hard, because the model cannot see what it has placed. SVG Lab's Design Engine, inside the SVG Lab MCP, gives the connected AI drawing tools, guides and checks, so it places shapes, looks at the result and corrects it, point by point, inside your SVG Lab project. The output is vector shapes you can keep working with, exportable as SVG, PNG or PDF.
What it produced
We gave Claude Opus 5.5 (Anthropic) one brief for a creative consumer app, one run, no edits. It designed an evening sketching app called murmur. The heron at sunset, the cat on the sill, the flocks of birds, the figure and the elderberry sprig were each drawn point by point and placed as vector shapes, and the arched frames, palette and sketch prompts come from those drawings. About 40 minutes and 119 design steps.
What went wrong
The subtitle on the first screen runs off the right edge. We left it in. A drawn design is a first draft, and you review it like you would a designer's.
It is also not the fast path: Google Stitch finished four screens of its own in about 11 minutes in the same test, with simpler illustrations. The full side-by-side, including what Stitch did well, is here.
Which tool for which job
- Illustrations drawn as vectors and built into an app UI: SVG Lab (svglab.app), through the SVG Lab MCP.
- A quick one-off picture where you do not need shapes: an image generator.
- Working app code: a code builder such as v0.
The SVG Lab MCP draws and designs and does not animate; animation is a separate product, the SVG Animate MCP, which releases next week.
Every SVG Lab account gets 100 free requests to try the SVG Lab MCP, once. The images, the method and a 7-question FAQ are in the full post on the SVG Lab blog: Can AI draw app illustrations instead of generating photos?
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