the design studio stack
run client work, decks, and deliverables without juggling six disconnected apps.
per seat for figma/notion
a design studio's actual bottleneck usually isn't the design tool — it's everything around it. the deck that has to look as good as the work, the video update that replaces a meeting, the doc that keeps three clients' brand guidelines from blurring together. this stack assumes figma is already the given and fills in the rest.
the pattern here is picking tools that make the studio look more put-together than its headcount suggests. a one-person studio with pitch decks and tella videos reads like an agency. a one-person studio with a screen recording and a google slides deck reads like, well, one person.
skip the temptation to consolidate into fewer tools for its own sake — notion for docs and figma for design is a fine seam. you don't need one tool that does both badly.
the stack — 7 tools
design & prototyping
Figma
compareplugins, handoff, and every client already knows how to open a file.
studio docs & wiki
Notion
compareshared client docs the whole team can edit, not a personal notes app.
file storage
Google Drive
boring and reliable — every client already has an account.
contracts & invoicing
Bonsai
proposals, contracts, and invoicing in one place, built for freelancers.
skip this stack if
- ×you're a solo designer with no clients yet — most of this is overkill until you have handoffs and proposals to manage.
- ×you need a heavyweight cms for content-driven sites — webflow's still the better call there, framer's a tradeoff.
- ×your team already lives in adobe — switching the whole pipeline to figma is a bigger lift than this list suggests.
one of 5 opinionated stacks.
see all stacks →