Making sense of everything at the start of a project.

I’ve used Milanote for a few years now, straight from the first phone call with a new prospect or a kick-off meeting with a returning client. It’s become part of how I start thinking about a project before anything is designed or properly structured. At that stage, everything tends to arrive at once starting with ideas, stakeholder input, early copy through to references, and imagery. Sometimes it’s clear, often it isn’t. There’s usually a lot of useful material, but not much clarity around what actually matters or how it fits together. That’s where things can start to move sideways, because it hasn’t been shaped yet. I use Milanote as a working space for that stage, and it’s where everything goes while a project is still taking shape. Not to organise it neatly, but to get it out of documents and into something visible. Once it’s all in one place, you can start to move things around, group ideas, and see what naturally connects. A clearer direction starts to form and that movement is important. It’s the point where a project moves from having a lot of inputs to having a sense of intent, whist also changes how decisions are made. Rather than reacting to individual pieces in isolation, you’re looking at how everything works together. Milanote has also been particularly useful on projects with multiple stakeholders. Feedback can easily become fragmented when people are responding in different places or at different times. Having a shared space where everything is visible brings that back into one conversation. It doesn’t remove feedback, but it makes it more focused and easier to manage. By the time anything moves into design, there’s already a structure in place. The message is clearer, the direction has been considered and the work has something to build on. It’s a simple tool, but it’s become a reliable part of how I get from a starting point that feels broad and undefined to something that makes sense. And in most projects, that’s the part that makes the biggest difference.