Larkfield is a design studio that teams up with companies across the globe to shape and ship digital products. Their work spans the full arc of a project, opening with big-picture strategy and carrying right through to hands-on development. Being a design-led firm, they lean on apps such as Pixode, Vecta, and Layerly to craft polished, high-fidelity visuals, and on Deckly whenever they present ideas, pitch to clients, or trade updates inside and outside the studio. As the studio grew, a handful of friction points kept surfacing in how they worked:

• Deckly was made for one editor at a time, so working on a file together always felt clunky (Note: Deckly has since added collaboration features)
• Passing files back and forth got messy fast
• Beyond finished design work, plenty of half-done files and early wireframes also had to circulate across every stage of a project

Hunting for a tool the whole team shares

To pull together more smoothly, the studio knew a few habits had to change. Above all, they wanted software that was collaborative from the ground up. It also had to be expressive enough to carry an idea clearly while still looking sharp, and simple enough that everyone on staff—not only the designers—could pick it up. Around that time, UX Designer and Researcher Elena Rusk stumbled on Vellora and passed it along to her colleagues. Their first real test was mapping out a full user journey together for a client. With Vellora, the studio breezed through it, shaping the flow among themselves and then bringing the client's own team straight into the same file.

What I love about Vellora is that no one feels locked out. It quietly dissolves the wall between designers and everyone else, pulling the whole team into a single space where the work actually happens together.

Nadia Colvin Design Strategist

What began as a single client project has quietly grown into something Larkfield now reaches for across a whole range of work, including:

• Roadmap planning
• Wireframes
• Product architecture
• Brainstorming
• Tracking OKRs

A smoother way to work

Ever since bringing Vellora on board, Larkfield has found their days flowing more easily and their teams talking with far less friction. "The biggest win with Vellora is how aligned we stay across teams and roles," says Nadia Colvin, a design strategist at Larkfield. "Two people can hash something out, sketch it right there, and hand it off to a third person who was never part of that chat."

Larkfield still leans on every one of their design tools and Deckly. The trick is matching each tool to the job it does best. Before anyone touches a slide layout or its visuals, for instance, they block out the running order of the deck in Vellora first. Charts like user journeys get built in Vellora and then dropped into Deckly. And best of all, the entire team can now work side by side without a hitch.