For design studios
Polaris for design studios
Nobody has ever put a line item for asset renaming on an invoice, and every studio pays for it anyway.
The short answer
Design studios bill for design work and absorb everything surrounding it: handoff specifications, weekly client updates, asset naming and organisation, brand consistency audits and scoping documents. Polaris lets that surrounding layer be assigned to AI workers, with Figma in the connection catalog, deliverables arriving as files on the task, and a designer closing every task before it counts as done.
Where a studio actually loses money
A studio quotes for a piece of design work, and the design work usually lands roughly where it was estimated. What blows the estimate is the layer around it. The specification a developer needs before they can build the thing. The weekly update to a client who is anxious because they cannot see progress. Renaming three hundred exports so the handoff is usable. The audit of whether the brand still looks like itself across nine surfaces after a year of small decisions.
None of this is design and all of it is required. It is also the work that gets deprioritised when a deadline tightens, which is exactly when its absence causes the most damage: a rushed handoff produces a build that does not match, and the studio absorbs the correction round.
Five jobs that eat a studio week
Handoff specification
Spacing, states, tokens, behaviour and edge cases, written up so an engineer does not have to guess or ask. Slow, careful, and almost never quoted for.
The weekly client update
Pure cost, always late, assembled from a board and two conversations. It is also the single biggest driver of whether a client feels well served.
Design system upkeep
The component that drifted, the token that got overridden, the pattern used two ways in the same product. Everyone agrees it should be maintained continuously and nobody has the hours.
Brand consistency audits
Checking a brand against itself across site, product, social and print. Genuinely valuable to a client and hard to sell as a line item.
Scoping and estimating
Turning a vague brief into a scoped proposal, which consumes senior designer time before any money exists.
What changes when the layer is assigned
The design stays with designers. The documentation around it does not have to.
| Job | Today | Assigned to a worker |
|---|---|---|
| Handoff spec | Written by the designer at the end of the project, when they are already on the next one | Drafted from the workstream and the Figma connection, then corrected by the designer |
| Weekly client update | Unbillable, written on a Friday afternoon | Drafted from the workstream, reviewed and sent by the account lead |
| Design system audit | Deferred indefinitely | A standing task that reports drift, with the findings as a file on the task |
| Proposal and scope document | Senior designer time spent before the work is won | A structured draft to argue with, so the senior time goes into the estimate rather than the formatting |
How a studio would set it up
The structure
- One workstream per client or per project
- Lanes matching your stages, shared between list and board view
- Docs nested per project, versioned, with review and comments
- Freelance collaborators added at no cost, because there are no seats
The roster
- A technical writer for handoff specs and documentation
- A content writer for client updates and case study drafts
- A research analyst for competitive and category work in pitches
- The Chief of Staff keeping every task owned and dated across projects
Next, for a design studio
The Figma connection, the design use cases, and the agency argument if you also resell hours.
Connect Figma to Polaris
A Figma token belongs to a person, and Polaris shows you which person it verified, which is the detail worth checking before you store it.
Design work an AI teammate can take, and the part it cannot
Five jobs around the work, none of them the work itself. Taste stays where it belongs.
Is this final? Asked for the fourth time this month
A completeness check before build starts, so the question is answered before it is asked.
Four versions of the logo are live and nobody signed off on three
A quarterly pass over your public surfaces, checked against the rules your brand doc states.
Polaris for agencies
You already know what an hour of delivery sells for. This is a page about what it costs.
Questions people ask
+Can a worker read our Figma files?
Figma is in the connection catalog, so a worker can be given access to it with one click, authorised once for the organisation and stored server-side. What it does with that access depends on the task you assign and the skill file you wrote for it. It is not a design tool and it does not produce design work.
+Is this better than Notion plus a tracker for a studio?
For holding project information, Notion and a tracker are perfectly good and you should not switch on aesthetics. The difference is that neither of them writes the handoff spec or the client update. If the layer costing you margin is documentation rather than organisation, that is the reason to look; if your problem is genuinely organisation, be honest that a free workspace is a smaller win.
+How would we price this into client work?
Hours are itemised on the work log with an estimated human-equivalent hour count per job, produced by an open formula. Whether that becomes a passed-through cost, an absorbed margin improvement or a reason to quote a documentation phase properly is your commercial decision. The evidence supports all three conversations.
+We are four people. Does the workspace cost anything at that size?
No. There is no seat count and no tier, so four designers plus whatever freelancers a project needs cost nothing, and removing them later costs nothing either. The only bill is roughly two dollars per human-equivalent hour that an AI worker delivers.
+Is a design studio a good first user of a beta product?
Honestly, only in one place. Client-facing deliverables in a public beta carry a reputational risk that a studio cannot really afford. Start with something internal, such as your own design system audit or your own case studies, where a weak first draft costs an afternoon and nobody outside the studio ever sees it.
Related
Polaris for agencies
You already know what an hour of delivery sells for. This is a page about what it costs.
Polaris for product teams
Look at a product manager's calendar and subtract the meetings. What is left is mostly reformatting.
Connect Figma to Polaris
A Figma token belongs to a person, and Polaris shows you which person it verified, which is the detail worth checking before you store it.
Design work an AI teammate can take, and the part it cannot
Five jobs around the work, none of them the work itself. Taste stays where it belongs.
The component was renamed and the documentation was not
A weekly drift report between the component library and the documentation that describes it.
Is this final? Asked for the fourth time this month
A completeness check before build starts, so the question is answered before it is asked.
Hire an AI technical writer
The documentation debt on your team is not a writing problem, it is a nobody-has-two-free-hours problem, and this is the worker for those two hours.
Tool stack cost for a 5-person team
Three subscriptions, five people, and the arithmetic laid out so you can check it against your own invoices.