Figma for design, working prototypes for anything with behaviour, whichever content management system your own team will operate, and a shared tracker holding the schedule and the open decisions. Tool names matter far less than the principle under them, which is that you should finish an engagement holding access to the systems your assets live in and not a folder of exports.
Interface and layout design. Figma, structured as a component library with named styles instead of a pile of loose frames. Organized that way, a colour change propagates instead of being repeated ninety times by hand, and your next designer can work inside it. You get a seat during the project and keep it afterwards.
Identity artwork. Vector source files handed over editable, plus the production formats a printer, a sign fabricator or an embroiderer will ask for. An identity you cannot open is one you cannot extend, and flattened images are where that goes wrong.
Prototypes. Anything with behaviour gets prototyped before it is built, because a static screen cannot show what happens on error, on empty or over a slow connection. That is where the behaviour of an interface gets settled, and clicking through one produces sharper feedback than looking at a picture of it.
The platform the work ships on. Webflow, WordPress, Shopify or WooCommerce, chosen against who operates the site after launch instead of what we enjoy building in. Anything custom is built on our own engineering bench and documented well enough for a developer who has never met us to take it over.
Measurement. Analytics, tag manager and search console, registered to your company from the day each is created.
Tracking and documents. A shared board carrying the schedule, the open decisions and who owes what by when, plus a document space holding the scope, the notes and every written approval. The product name matters least. What matters is that you can look at it without asking anybody, and that nothing important lives only in somebody's inbox.
Where we bend and where we do not. We will work inside your ticketing system and messaging platform where you have them, because making a client change tools for one supplier is slow and rude. We will not run design in something that cannot hold a component library, since that cost arrives on your desk long after we have gone. Before signing with anybody, establish whether you get a seat in the design file, whether the platform account is in your name, and what transfers at handover. Those answers matter most on the product side of the practice, where what you own is a living system somebody has to keep extending.
