Every studio has its own operating system — not just creatively, but practically too. The platforms quietly holding together timelines, concepts, client communication, internal workflows, feedback rounds, strategy development, content planning, and everything in between.

Over the years, our toolkit has evolved constantly. Some platforms come and go quickly. Others become so embedded into the way we work that it’s difficult to imagine the studio without them. These are the ones we keep coming back to and exactly how they fit into our day-to-day at Isla Luna Studio.

Notion

If there’s one platform that functions as the internal brain of Isla Luna Studio, it’s Notion.

Nearly every part of the business lives there in some capacity: finances, client resources and project hubs, social planning, brainstorming documents, operational systems, internal checklists, future ideas, and team hubs. Each person on our team has their own organizational setup tied into broader studio workflows, which makes collaboration significantly easier across projects happening at the same time.

Notion becomes especially valuable during the early stages of client work. Every client, whether they’re a current partner, past project, or incoming lead, receives their own workspace where we gather questionnaire responses, early strategy notes, positioning ideas, copy concepts, references, and creative direction. Most of those tabs never become client-facing in their original form. They tend to start as massive working documents that eventually get distilled into a much more refined presentation or strategy deck.

A lot of the strongest ideas happen in those messy middle stages, and Notion gives us space to think through them collaboratively before anything becomes polished.

Adobe Creative Cloud

Adobe Creative Cloud will always be the foundation of our brand and visual identity work. It’s where many of our core creative ideas take shape, from logo development and visual identity systems to mockups and exploratory design concepts.

While Figma has become our primary platform for collaboration, creative direction, and website design, Adobe's suite of tools is still where many of the core brand assets are created. We regularly use Illustrator for logo development, scalable vector graphics, and brand identity design, while Photoshop plays an important role in image editing, mockups, and creating more complex visual compositions that help bring creative ideas to life. For larger brand guidelines and documentation projects, tools like InDesign allow us to build more robust and detailed brand systems.

Each platform serves a different purpose, but together they create a workflow that keeps strategy, creative direction, and execution closely connected. Adobe provides the creative foundation. Figma is where those pieces come together, evolve collaboratively, and ultimately take shape as a cohesive brand experience.

Figma

Figma sits in the middle of strategy and execution.

It’s our go-to platform for interface design, which includes website sitemaps, wireframes, UX/UI systems, and full website prototypes before development begins. Compared to Notion, this is much more client-facing. Mood boards, styles, components, user flows, and design systems all begin coming together visually inside Figma.

Beyond the design work itself, Figma plays a key role in our creative process. It's where mood boards, references, and early creative directions come together, giving the entire team a shared space to brainstorm, collaborate, and build on ideas in real time.

Before a website is ever built on a live platform, clients first approve these blueprint stages. It creates alignment early and allows us to think through user experience intentionally before moving into development.

More recently, AI integrations within Figma have also become part of our workflow. Certain plugins help speed up repetitive UX and layout tasks, which allows us to move faster operationally without removing the creative thinking behind the work itself. That distinction matters to us: Faster execution is valuable, but replacing creative direction is not the goal.

Canva

Canva plays a very different role in our process than Adobe does.

We primarily use it as a client handoff tool, especially for social media templates and ongoing marketing assets that clients will continue using long after a project wraps. The platform is intentionally user-friendly, which makes it easier for clients to confidently manage their own content without needing a designer for every single asset update.

Once a brand identity is established, we often build editable brand kits that allow clients to apply their visual identity consistently across Instagram stories, launch graphics, announcements, presentations, and other marketing materials. Features like brand kits, color matching, and template libraries help maintain consistency while still giving clients flexibility.

Part of our role as a studio is building systems clients can actually sustain. Giving people tools they feel comfortable using independently keeps retainer costs lower while helping the brand stay cohesive over time.

Pinterest & Cosmos

Pinterest and Cosmos are both tools we use regularly during the research and brainstorming phase of a project, but neither platform is where creative direction actually comes from. They're simply places where ideas can be collected, explored, and organized.

For us, creative direction starts with strategy. Before we're gathering visual references, we're defining the problem we're solving, understanding the audience, identifying the opportunity within the market, and determining how a brand should show up in a way that feels distinct, relevant, and aligned with its goals. The creative direction grows from those decisions first.

Once that foundation is established, tools like Pinterest and Cosmos help us search for visual representations of those ideas. They're useful for translating abstract concepts into tangible references, exploring different creative possibilities, and communicating a direction more clearly. The goal is never to copy or emulate what's already out there. It's to gather inspiration that helps bring a strategic point of view to life.

Inspiration can come from architecture, fashion, photography, art history, literature, travel, conversations, cultural movements, or personal experiences just as often as it comes from a saved image online.

When developing concepts for a recent fashion client, for example, our references extended far beyond the category itself. We found ourselves looking at historical portraiture, vintage menswear campaigns, and the subtle body language often seen in classic luxury advertising. Those references helped shape a feeling, not just an aesthetic.

Platforms like Pinterest and Cosmos become useful because they help us collect and synthesize those influences into something cohesive. They support the process, but they are not the process.

That's also why we think about creative direction as much more than a mood board. It's the strategic framework that helps a brand show up consistently across photography, design, messaging, content, customer experience, and every touchpoint in between. The visuals matter, but the larger goal is creating a clear point of view and a recognizable world people want to be part of.

In a time when almost every reference is accessible online, originality rarely comes from discovering something entirely new. More often, it comes from the meaning, perspective, and strategic thinking behind how existing influences are interpreted and combined.

Planoly

Social media strategy becomes much harder to execute consistently without systems behind it.

Planoly has been one of the biggest organizational tools for managing content planning, scheduling posts, writing captions, brainstorming ideas, responding to comments, and tracking performance across accounts. Since we manage both client platforms and our own studio content simultaneously, having a centralized system matters.

The analytical side is equally important. Performance insights help us understand what content resonates, when audiences are most engaged, and where strategy adjustments need to happen. It keeps social media from becoming purely reactive.

At the end of the day, strong content still needs structure behind it to stay consistent.

Toggl

Toggl is probably the least glamorous platform we use, but realistically, the studio could not function without it.

The platform allows us to track time across clients, projects, and specific categories of work, which helps with everything from billing to internal resource management. It gives visibility into how long different deliverables actually take and where the team’s bandwidth is going throughout a given month.

That information matters operationally. It helps us price more accurately, manage timelines more realistically, and identify where processes can become more efficient over time.

Not every essential tool is visually exciting. Some just keep the business running well behind the scenes.

Our take on AI 

AI is showing up in more and more corners of the creative industry, changing the way teams approach everything from organization to execution.

We use AI at Isla Luna Studio, but much more selectively than people might assume. Rather than building our process around AI, we view it as one resource within a much larger toolkit. It's become a useful way to remove friction from certain parts of the process, but it's not something we've fully integrated into every aspect of the studio, nor is it something we rely on to generate ideas, strategy, or creative direction. We see it as a support tool, not a substitute for the thinking, experience, and perspective that drive our work.

Most often, we use it to help accelerate administrative or technical tasks. That might mean helping organize large amounts of information, structuring an early working document, troubleshooting a coding issue on a website build, identifying a faster solution to a technical problem, or helping kickstart a process when we're staring at a blank page. In those situations, AI can help us move more efficiently without changing the thinking behind the work itself.

What it doesn't do is replace strategy, creative direction, decision making, copywriting, client relationships, or the human perspective that sits at the center of every project. If anything, we find AI works best when there's already a strong point of view guiding it. We also recognize that AI is far from infallible. Outputs can be inaccurate, incomplete, or miss important context, which is why we approach them with a healthy degree of skepticism. Every output is reviewed, refined, fact-checked, and filtered through our own judgment before it becomes part of any client-facing work.

While many companies are investing heavily in AI-powered systems and proprietary tools, we currently approach the technology more pragmatically. Claude has become our primary platform, though we use it relatively sparingly and only when it serves a clear purpose. We haven't built our studio around automation, nor do we believe every part of the creative process should be automated.

In many ways, our philosophy toward AI mirrors our philosophy toward tools like Pinterest and Cosmos. The value isn't in the tool itself. The value comes from the ideas, perspective, and strategic thinking that guide how it's used.

As creative industries become increasingly automated, we believe human discernment becomes even more valuable. Technology can accelerate execution. It cannot replace curiosity, taste, context, empathy, or lived experience.

Ultimately, we approach AI the same way we approach branding itself: intentionally, strategically, and with a clear understanding of what should still remain human.

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