I get asked about my setup often enough that writing it down saves us both time. This is everything, not a curated list of three impressive things.
**Where the work happens**
– Figma for anything with a grid. I design in the browser, not an app.
– A plain text editor for code. No IDE, no plugins to keep updated.
– A paper notebook for the part before the screen.
**What ships it**
– WordPress for websites, because clients can update it without me.
– Notion for anything a client needs to read and edit.
– Hand-written HTML email, because frameworks lie about email.
**What keeps it honest**
– A 2019 laptop that I refuse to replace until my sites get faster than it.
– A phone from 2021 on a throttled connection.
– The Lighthouse panel, mostly to confirm what I already suspect.
There’s no clever stack here. The interesting work is deciding what to leave out, and no tool does that for you.