Hey friends,

The last few editions have been a little philosophical, so this week I want to jam with you on AI: what I'm doing, my north star, and how I'm doing my dang best to not get overwhelmed.
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I'll start by saying that we are all in this thing together. All learning and experimenting with this crazy stuff as we go.
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I'm also going to lead with my North Star from the perspective of a service provider:

I'm pretty adamant about this. But now that's covered, let's jam.

Having a "Tried and True"

As more and more tools get released and claim to be the best, there should be nuance because each of us is different in how we operate. And in what we do for clients.
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Here are a few of my foundational tools that I'm always coming back to, and all affect the client-facing side of my business:
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​ChatGPT & Claude: A comprehensive tool for building client knowledge bases and conducting competitor research. Using the projects features of these is seriously incredible for stored knowledge and building off of past conversations

TL;DV: Ensures no detail is missed by capturing and analyzing client calls. A lot of these transcripts are then included into the projects feature for the client to reference later.

Moxie Form Generator: Uses transcripts to create forms that gather essential information and help fill in gaps

Proprietary: My Creative Tools

Webflow: Facilitate creative duplication, image optimization, and SEO enhancements, reducing manual effort

Relume: Streamlines the design process by transforming client info and research into wireframes, which reduces a lot of friction for me.
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​Adobe Suite: My go-to for icons, creative assets, and building out brand visuals like color palettes and social graphics. Still one of the most versatile tools in my kit. I use Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Illustrator, Lightroom, and others which all have a few

Figma: Great for collaboration and clean design mockups. I use it heavily for design system work and UI builds before heading into Webflow.

Webflow: Not just for development, but for cutting creative time in half. I use it for layout animations, image optimization, and speeding up responsive builds.

Framer: Excellent for quick animations and interactive mockups. I’m using it more and more when I want to pitch or prototype ideas with motion baked in.

Toolfolio: A great resource for design inspiration. Useful when I need to break out of a creative rut or explore fresh visual directions.

Internal: My Own Marketing & Research

These are tools that I use that aren't necessarily client facing, but help me with a ton of stuff in the day to day at MMG.

Kleo – Helps optimize and improve engagement on my LinkedIn posts by analyzing tone, structure, and clarity. Also helps me see what worked ell on past weeks of content.

VidIQ – My go-to for YouTube. I watch a lot of videos around other people's process or when i want to learn something new, so the transcripts feature and analyzer stuff in the plugin make retention a little better.

Riverside: Handles all my podcast recording and post-production with clean audio and video quality, plus easy editing tools. Saves me a lot of time even though the polish isn't as high as Premiere Pro

NotebookLM: Used for studying transcripts and surfacing key takeaways for blog posts, newsletters, or podcast recaps. I like to put call transcripts in here too. :)

Aspirational (What I'm experimenting with and cannot yet recommend)

Bolt, V0, and Lovable: A trio of tools I’m experimenting with to speed up web builds, generate UI layouts from prompts, and refine brand positioning and messaging through AI.

Google’s New AI Tools – Exploring new AI-powered creative workflows for image generation, writing, and code suggestions. These include Veo 3 for Video, Stitch for Web, and AI mode in Search.

TweakCN: Generates CSS styles to speed up front-end decisions and polish. Really cool so far, and I can export the CSS Codes into Figma for later use.

UX Pilot: A wire framing tool that has more AI features than Relume, but allows for more zero to one dev and actual visual generation of code.

MagicPath: Similar to UX Pilot, but seeing much better results from a visual standpoint

That might've been a lot. But I think we'll stop there.
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I want to end by emphasizing a few of my previous points: just because I or any other people we follow seem like they are light years ahead with this stuff, I feel the exact same as you.
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​Seriously learning as I go here.​
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So much of the "skill" is finding out how these shiny objects actually layer onto each other and make our process faster instead of just bouncing around, paying for more than we need, and just being confused. Which has happened, and often does, lol.

Feel free to hit reply and share some of your own favs, or just some thoughts from your journey this week. I read and respond to every one.

Onward to Week 76. ✌️

I hope my note today was the fuel to keep yourself to keep going.

Expect these short messages every Sunday with some marketing wisdom, updates from MMG, and a positive note to keep doing what you're doing.

Talk soon,

Andy Milligan
​Founder | MMG Design ​
​MMG Design | B2B Web Design + Content

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