The secret tool that holds our studio together (it’s not Jira!)
Here’s a little peek behind the scenes of Ponder: Which digital tools do we rely on on a daily basis to get our work done efficiently and happily? Learn about our essential helpers from design, to productivity, finance and collaboration – and of course the one almighty tool to rule them all. Let’s go!
Design
For actual Design work we heavily rely on Figma – probably not a big surprise. We’re old enough to have experienced multiple of the big switches of our craft: From letterpress to Desktop Publishing to Photoshop to (yes, for Design) Keynote, from Keynote to the very first version of Sketch (what a revelation that was!), from Marvel to InVision to.. well no InVision (RIP Clark!), and finally to Figma. While no tool is perfect, Figma does feel like “this is how digital design and prototyping should be working” and the speed with which they release thought-through features is just impressive. Figma also happens to be our presentation tool, we entirely moved away from Keynote/Powerpoint – the ability to follow multiple presenters, have native prototypes directly within the presentation (and being able to fix the occasional mistake live while your teammates are presenting) – massive game changer!
For Design System Documentation we usually use Zeroheight, which neatly connects with Figma and offers just the right balance of structure vs flexibility that usually works just fine for the level of documentation we do.
Productivity
There’s plenty of smaller (MacOS) productivity tools and hacks that we could list here, but we want to highlight one that definitely sticks out to us: Raycast is an extremely powerful launcher that lets you search, automate, translate and customize directly from a single input field. If you are a keyboard-heavy user and are not using Raycast (or Alfred, the OG) yet – try it.
Collaboration & Communication
Our team communication lives in Slack, and so does most of our client communication. As users of the very first versions in 2013 (ish?) we’re not necessarily big fans of the Salesforcification of Slack in recent years, but it still seems to be the way to go for us. For all sorts of digital collaboration we rely on Miro (anyone remember when it was still called Realtimeboard?) – with the occasional Mural or Figjam in between, but Miro is our go-to if we can choose.
The backbone
We use Google Workspace for our digital infrastructure (calendar, email, file storage, docs, etc) – which hasn’t always been the case: For over 2 years we fought hard to avoid Google altogether and used various self-hosted alternatives (Nextcloud primarily), but we just didn’t succeed to make it frictionless enough to work for us. We might write about this whole struggle at some point – it still kinda bugs us.
Our secret sauce
The one allmighty tool that holds Ponder together is Airtable. CRM? Airtable. Finance forecasting? Airtable. Survey data dashboards? Airtable. Structured list of bookmarks? Airtable. Content calendar, time tracking, project planning? Airtable. The list is infinite. Does it come with the risk of creating an uncontrollable monster of interconnected automations and integrations that no one understands anymore? Absolutely yes. But the level of flexibility it gives you to build your tooling just the exact way you need it is just mind blowing.
Finance & Paperwork
Behind the scenes of our Finance department we rely on Lexoffice for offers, invoicing and bookkeeping. It connects neatly with our GLS bank account, it’s ugly enough to not distract us from work too much and apparently our accountant is happy with it too. Everything else lives in Google Sheets and ✨Airtable.
Small Stuff
- PDF Squeezer: Does what the name suggests, it squeezes huge PDF files (looking at you, Figma!)
- ImageOptim: A classic that also does what the name suggests: It optims images before they go on the web.
- Endel or Portal: Stay focused with lovely sounds and visuals.
So much for the most essential tools! We’re considering a post about essential browser extensions as well as Figma plugins, so let us know if this sort of content feels helpful to you!
Join the conversation
Twitter Mastodon