Helen Turner is lead UI designer at Zello, a Collingwood agency whose flagship office is in Sydney and whose clients include Asahi Beverages. She calls herself a Figma fangirl, historically Mrs Figma, and she means it as a confession.

Design it, hand it off, QA it back

The old process had a shape. Everything happened in Figma, went to one of the agency’s front-end developers for a custom build, and came back to her for QA: checking links, checking the build matched the design, working out the kinks. She is quick to say the devs are good. That was never the problem.

The problem was the ceiling. There were things she could see clearly and could not make. Meanwhile the app work kept coming — Coastar, a loyalty rewards app for Asahi, and the annual Greatest Catch campaign — busy without being forward motion. She had After Effects. She was teaching herself Jitter. AI had, as she puts it, “exponentially just catapulted everyone into the future,” and she was not moving with it.

I was starting to feel a little bit stagnant.

The client who trusted her with the whole thing

The catalyst was Learnable, an AI product purpose-built for cognitive ability. Helen was already doing the product design when the client asked her to take on the marketing site as well.

It was a two-person company, an ex-tech CEO and an NDIS specialist, which meant every dollar and every week had to count, and there was no development resource to spare on marketing while the product itself was being built. She offered to bite off slightly more than she could chew.

It worked. The site went up quickly, looked polished and genuinely professional, and consumed no developer hours from the product side at all. That was the point the tool stopped being an experiment.

Saying “see, we can do it”

The change she describes most often is not speed. It is what happens when a developer tells her something cannot be built. She is not, by her own admission, someone who enjoys hearing no, so she opens Framer, builds the thing she was after, and shows them. Her word for it is independence, and it takes time out of the development process as a side effect.

There is a translation benefit underneath it. She had done front-end classes years ago through Treehouse, enough to loosely speak the same language as engineers. Framer cemented it. A frame is a div, and the vocabulary now runs cleanly from Figma through Framer to the development team.

One design, three breakpoints

The responsive model is the thing she keeps returning to. One master design at the desktop breakpoint, and changes flow through tablet and mobile. The old way meant building 1280 or 1440 for the developers, then a separate mobile view on top. It still needs manual tweaking, she notes, “but you’ve got those two views at the smaller breakpoint already kind of automated for you.”

She has been using shaders on a current client’s login and sign-up screens, and is deep enough into AI tooling — Framer’s agents, Figma’s, Claude — to be comparing them against each other for interest rather than need. She describes herself, accurately, as a total nerd for that kind of thing.

A course you play along with

She started the Ultimate Framer Masterclass about twelve months ago. What kept her in it was not the video library.

It’s not just so much a show and tell, it’s more of a play along at home.

She submitted a build recently and got feedback back on it, which she describes as “a really active two-way” rather than learning alone with nothing to show for it. There is the Slack channel she checks every day, and the Melbourne meetups, which is how she came across the community in the first place.

What she would do with more of it

The next step is client work of her own. She has historically avoided freelance builds for a plain reason: she could not build them, which meant recommending a developer, blowing out the budget and the timeline, and handing over control of the outcome.

If I could design and build a website for a client, that would be financially beneficial for both myself and them. And it feels good making things.

There is a smaller test running at home. Her wife is a florist with a Squarespace site built eight years ago, and Helen — who calls her, affectionately, the most technically illiterate person she has ever met — is rebuilding it in Framer on the assumption she will be able to maintain it herself.