Why My Design Stack Just Changed Forever.

‍‍A 20-year journey from Adobe to AI — and the three tools that now run my world

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I have an confession to make. I still have Adobe Creative Suite installed. I probably always will. But I haven't opened Illustrator out of habit in a long time. And I'm not sorry about it.

What I am is genuinely excited about design in a way I haven't felt since the first time components clicked in my brain and I thought — wait, you mean I never have to update that button a hundred times again?

Let me back up.

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The Adobe Years (And Why They Were Good)

For most of my career, Adobe Creative Suite was the air I breathed. Illustrator for vectors, logo design, storyboards, and social. InDesign for long-form thought leadership and print. Photoshop for image manipulation, compositing, and yes — animated GIFs before that was even cool.

I knew those tools the way a chef knows their knives. Deeply, intuitively, without thinking. And for a long time, that fluency was the craft.

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Then Sketch Happened

Around 2010, someone introduced me to Sketch. And something shifted.

The canvas felt natural in a way Illustrator never quite did for screen design. The ability to create components — reusable, updatable, alive — genuinely blew my mind. If I'm being honest, Sketch is still my sentimental favorite. There was something pure about it: clean, fast, focused. It did what it did and it did it beautifully.

I didn't want to give it up. But then Figma arrived, and I didn't have a choice.

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Figma Changed Everything (Again)

By early 2020, I had fully made the switch. And I haven't looked back.

Figma did everything Sketch did, and then kept going. Auto layout (which I have a love-hate relationship with that is entirely ongoing). Real-time collaboration with teams. Grids, frames, design systems, FigJam for working sessions, components that could actually talk to each other. It became the center of gravity for almost everything I do. Today I spend more time in Figma than in any other tool — and that's saying something given where I started.

But even Figma didn't prepare me for what was coming next.

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Enter AI. Enter Claude.

I did what most creatives did — I tried ChatGPT, poked around Perplexity, figured out where AI fit into my workflow. But Claude became my real go-to. It thinks the way I think. It's my co-pilot for strategy, copy, ideation, and increasingly for things I couldn't have imagined doing without a developer beside me.

Claude Code, Claude Cowork, the API integrations — the ecosystem keeps expanding. If I can't figure something out, Claude is the first place I go. That's not a small thing after 20 years of figuring things out myself.

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And Then Stitch.

This is the part that made me stop and just sit with it for a minute.

Google launched Stitch at Google I/O last year as a Google Labs experiment — a tool that generates UIs for mobile and web applications, making design ideation fast and easy. Stitch Interesting. Useful. But what just happened this week is a different story entirely.

On March 19, Google shipped a complete redesign. Stitch now features a new AI-native, infinite canvas that gives ideas room to grow from early ideations to working prototypes. Google You can bring anything to the canvas — images, text, code — and a built-in design agent reasons across the entire project's evolution.

Here's what gets me: you can upload a screenshot of a compelling UI, a whiteboard sketch, or a rough wireframe, and Stitch processes the image to produce a corresponding digital UI — then paste it directly into Figma for refinement. Google Developers I took a static PNG of a website and had a working web layout in minutes. Not perfect. But a real starting point, not a blank canvas.

The new features go further than that. A Voice Canvas lets you speak directly to the canvas — the AI agent listens, asks clarifying questions, gives real-time design critiques, and makes live updates. Nxcode You can also save interface design details in a natural language file called DESIGN.md, designed to maintain a consistent look across design tools and projects. SiliconANGLE And critically for anyone working across tools: a new SDK and MCP server connect Stitch to coding assistants like Claude Code, Gemini CLI, and Cursor for seamless design-to-code workflows. WinBuzzer

The practical reality? The workflow for most teams right now is: explore in Stitch, refine in Figma, build in Antigravity or your deployment tool of choice. Nxcode For me, that means Stitch → Figma → Claude → Webflow or Framer. And I'm doing things that used to require a full team.

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What This Actually Means

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I want to be clear about something: I'm not afraid. I know that's the first thing people assume when a designer talks about AI tools — that we're all quietly terrified. I'm not.

What I have is a smaller team and a bigger output. What I have is the ability to go from brief to designed first draft in a fraction of the time it used to take. What I have is more creative control, not less — because I'm spending less time on production and more time on thinking.

The complex stuff — sophisticated CMS architecture, advanced GSAP animations, custom interactions — still needs a developer. That's not going away. But a landing page? A brand system? A responsive web layout? I can move fast and move alone in a way I genuinely couldn't two years ago.

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The Stack, Right Now

For anyone curious what my current workflow looks like:

For ideation and UI generation → Stitch For design, systems, and refinement → Figma For strategy, copy, and code co-piloting → Claude For deployment → Webflow or Framer

Adobe still lives on my machine. Photoshop for image work, Illustrator when vectors need to be vectors. But the center of gravity has shifted — and I think anyone who's been in this industry long enough to remember when Sketch felt revolutionary can feel it too.

This is the most exciting time to be a creative I've experienced in 20 years. And I've had a lot of exciting years.

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Elisa Ivany is a Creative Director and Brand Strategist based in Chicago, with 20+ years building brands across B2B SaaS, fintech, and healthcare. She builds in Figma, thinks in Claude, and is currently exploring everything Stitch can do.

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