Designing like a studio when you work alone

At twenty past nine, Anna Morel moves the same photograph for the third time. The morning light cuts through her Lyon studio and slices the reference wall into pale rectangles. On the table, two notebooks lie open, a client interview is still up on the screen, and several typographic explorations overlap one another.

She has been working for three weeks on Sillage, a young skincare brand created by Claire Vignal. The product exists, the first customers too, but the brand still looks like every other. Claire talks about precision, silence, and passed-down gestures. Competitors say exactly the same things.

Anna re-reads a sentence spoken almost in passing during their first conversation: "I don't want our customers to collect our products. I want them to know which one to keep."

She prints it out and places it at the centre of the table.

It is not yet a brand idea. It is a constraint strong enough to eliminate easy ideas.

For a long time, Anna began each project with the feeling of having too much material and not enough context. A photograph sat in her phone. A reference found six months earlier slept in a folder. A decisive remark was lost in the middle of a fifty-page transcript.

She could produce quickly, but first had to reconstruct the thread linking each element to the project.

"I thought I lacked time to create," she says. "In reality, I was mostly spending my time finding again what I had already understood."

Her first instinct was not to add artificial intelligence. She began by giving a precise function to each workspace.

Are.na became the space for open collection: where an image can arrive before Anna even knows why it matters. Eagle then takes in the private library: photographs, typefaces, screenshots, textures, and already-qualified references. In Milanote, she no longer sorts. She brings things closer together.

For Sillage, Anna conducted four interviews: Claire, her co-founder, a formulator, and a long-standing customer. The conversations were transcribed and structured in Dovetail. Anna links the verbatims to recurring themes, but also holds onto the sentences that resist classification.

Claude comes in during a second reading. She asks it to flag contradictions, words used with multiple meanings, and questions nobody answered. She never asks it to produce a concept.

A tension emerges: the brand describes itself as minimalist, yet customers mostly speak of trust, repetition, and familiarity. The project must therefore not simply appear simpler. It must make the choice more obvious.

"AI doesn't give me the direction. It helps me see the places where I haven't looked closely enough yet."

Anna Morel

Anna's system does not try to centralise everything. It follows the progressive transformation of raw material.

Anna prepares two territories for Sillage.

The first is calm, precise, and almost clinical. It perfectly translates the brief. The second is more tactile. The compositions breathe less, the photographs seem taken at hand height, and the typography more openly embraces traces of gesture.

Claire looks at the first direction for a long time. "This is exactly what we asked for," she says.

Then she returns to the second.

In it she recognises the formulation notebooks, the workshop shelves, and the way her customers keep a product near the basin. This direction answers the brief less literally, but it resembles the company more.

"Anna didn't arrive with fifty images asking us to choose. She showed us two ways of becoming more coherent, then helped us understand which one belonged to us."

Claire Vignal, founder of Sillage

Claire's remark changes the rest of the project. Anna is no longer trying to enrich the second direction. She removes what is stopping it from being obvious.

Krea can generate variations of material, light, or composition within minutes. Figma allows a system to be rolled out at a speed that would once have taken several days. Framer makes an intention interactive before the site is even built.

This speed does not reduce the work of selection. It increases it.

Anna therefore sets herself three rules. A generated image never goes directly into a deliverable. An important decision must be explainable without citing the tool that produced it. A proposal that could suit ten other brands returns to the exploration space.

"An image can be beautiful and completely useless. If it changes no decision, it solves nothing."

Anna Morel

Anna does not delegate the final selection of a direction. She does not let a tool write the presentation accompanying a concept on its own. She does not automatically turn a client comment into a task.

When someone says "this lacks energy," the problem is not necessarily in the colour. It may come from the rhythm, the typography, the photography, or simply from the fear of change.

Interpreting that sentence is part of the craft.

She also keeps a half-day free of generation and automatic summarising at the start of each project. She re-reads the interviews, handles the references, and writes her own observations. This silence allows her to distinguish what she thinks from what the system is proposing.

Once the direction is chosen, Anna brings other people into the project. For Sillage, a photographer translates the visual principles into images. A developer confronts the system with the constraints of the future site. The files do not arrive as a fixed set of rules but as an intention clear enough to guide their decisions.

Technology has not turned her practice into an autonomous studio. It has allowed her to recognise more precisely the moment when another perspective becomes necessary.

In the evening, Anna closes Figma before removing several images from the wall. The sentence printed that morning remains at the centre. It was there from the first interview, hidden within several hours of conversation.

The system helped her find it again. The choice to keep it is hers.

"I don't want AI to create in my place. I want it to help me stay longer with the questions that matter."

Anna Morel

Anna's augmented studio is not measured by the number of tools she uses. It is measured by the quality of the transitions between them.

A word becomes an insight. A reference becomes a direction. A direction becomes a system. The system finally becomes something other people can use without losing the original intention.

It is in these transitions that her craft gains value.

Discover Anna's daily stack on ToolTrim →