Building With a Structured AI Workflow: Notion, Figma, and Blender as One System
Originally published on Medium: https://medium.com/design-bootcamp/building-with-a-structured-ai-workflow-notion-figma-and-blender-as-one-system-18b83ef62163?source=rss-6c5be1f9757d------2
For the past year, I’ve been building solo — FLEXI-CASA’s full product lifecycle, and now a focus app called Isleo, with another product coming this August. The tools I use aren’t new. What changed recently is that I stopped treating them as separate steps and started running them as one structured system: Notion for roadmap and progress, Figma for style and design, Blender for the assets that have to feel like they belong together.
Here’s how that actually works.
My AI workflow
Notion: the roadmap and the engineering log
Notion is where the project lives outside of any single tool. I use it to track the roadmap and keep a running engineering log — not just a task list, but a record of decisions as they get made. It’s also the checkpoint layer: whenever design or code work happens elsewhere, Notion is where I go back to check progress against what was actually planned, and against the style that got locked in earlier in Figma. Without that, it’s too easy for AI-assisted work to quietly drift from the original direction over a few iterations.
Figma: deciding the style before building anything
Design starts with a mood board in Figma, not a mockup. Before committing to any single direction, I use image generation tools to test multiple styles against the same assets — same subject, different treatments — side by side. That comparison is what actually decides the app’s visual language, rather than picking a style and hoping it holds up.
Once the style is locked, I design the main page myself, by hand, in Figma. That page becomes the reference. From there, AI takes over building out the rest of the design, working off the style and visualization already established on that main page rather than inventing its own direction. Figma stays the source of truth throughout — not a handoff document, but something both I and the agents keep checking back against.
Moodboard in Figma
Blender: cohesion over speed
The core idea behind Isleo is simple: your focus time builds your own open world. Every focus session grows part of an island — stay consistent and it turns into paradise, break the streak and parts of it turn cursed, and the days you haven’t reached yet sit there as fog waiting to be revealed. Over a month, that adds up to one continuous island world that’s entirely a record of how you actually showed up.
The key feature is the animation — the moment you review that island and watch the pieces come together is meant to feel genuinely nice to look at. That’s where image or video generation tools stop being the right choice. When you generate visual assets independently and try to put them together, the shadows, shading, and color don’t quite match — each asset was rendered on its own terms. Individually each piece might look fine, but combined, the set doesn’t read as one cohesive world.
App Features
Blender solves that because everything is built and lit within the same 3D scene and shares the same rendering logic. Assets that are meant to sit next to each other actually match — same light source, same shading model, same material logic — instead of looking like they were stitched together from different generations. For something like Isleo, where the whole point is a world that feels internally consistent, that cohesion isn’t optional.
Landing Page for Isleo
The system, not the tools
None of these three tools is doing anything unusual on its own. What makes this a workflow rather than just “a designer using AI” is that each one has a defined job and hands off to the next: Figma decides what it should look like, Notion tracks whether it’s actually turning into that, and Blender makes sure the pieces that get built are visually one thing instead of several.
Isleo is built on this system, and I’m planning to release it this August. Right behind it is another product, built on the same workflow from day one instead of retrofitted onto it — more on that once Isleo is out.
One smaller question this has left me sitting with: agents don’t get tired the way I do. Humans need to eat, rest, and step away — an agent’s working rhythm doesn’t have that ceiling.
I’m starting to think that should change how I split work across the day rather than handing off the same kind of task whenever I happen to be at the keyboard. During the day, while I can give fast feedback, maybe that’s the window for the more intuitive, taste-driven calls. At night, when I’m not around to nudge it, maybe that’s when an agent should get the more ambiguous, structural work it can spend hours converging on without me. Still working that part out — more on it soon.
Building With a Structured AI Workflow: Notion, Figma, and Blender as One System was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.