Solo design studio · Fallstudie
When the client asks "when did we ever say serif?", line 14 of the March 12 meeting note comes back in her own words
Was dabei herauskommtAcross 12 meeting notes and 60-odd feedback emails, asking "what did Client A say about type direction?" returns the founder's own sentence, with her name on it and a "ClientA-0312-meeting · line 14" citation.
Tuesday, 3pm, screen sharing. The client's founder asks about the body typeface in the second round of concepts: "when did we ever say serif?" At the March 12 meeting she said, "let's go serif for body copy, sans feels too tech." The 47-minute recording from that day is still sitting in the Voice Memos app, but you can't dig through 47 minutes while on a call. So a second revision round gets scheduled, and three days go out the door unpaid.
This person runs a one-person brand design studio and covers nine clients alone. What she has: 40-odd meeting voice memos, hundreds of chat screenshots, concept feedback emails, and one Notion page per client. What follows is a hypothetical scenario that walks through what you could ask, and what shape the answer would take, if that material went into a Consilience workspace.
Nine clients' worth of records, carried by one person
There's no shortage of material. The problem is that nine clients' records are spread across four apps, and none of it searches in one place.
- 40-odd meeting voice memos. Twelve got typed up right after the meeting; the other 28 are still just audio files.
- Hundreds of chat screenshots. Live feedback like "make the logo bigger" exists only inside an image.
- 60-odd concept feedback emails. A single thread runs up to seven replies deep, and the conclusion is one line buried in the middle of the fifth one.
- Nine Notion pages, one per client. Meeting-note links and concept history are organized there, but there's no way to search across all nine.
- Nine clients × roughly three concept rounds each. Which round settled what lives only in the designer's head.
How it works today
When a client says "we never said that," she digs through the voice memos that evening. There were two March meetings, so first she has to figure out which one, then scrub through a 47-minute file starting around the 15-minute mark. Finding the moment takes about half an hour.
And even finding it doesn't help mid-meeting. There's no way to play a 47-minute recording on a screen share and land on the exact line. So most of the time she doesn't look, and just takes the second revision round. Three days gone. The same thing happens again next month in a Client B meeting.
Setting it up
You don't reorganize anything. The client folders go in exactly as they are — starting with Client A and Client B, the two where things get disputed most.
Start with the 12 meeting notes that already exist as text
Open "Extract sources" (Cmd+Shift+I) in the sidebar and drag the whole client folder in. Leave the 28 audio files out at this stage. If there's no text, it won't show up in an answer.
Drop the chat screenshots in the same place
Drag the image folder in alongside, and OCR reads the letters inside the bubbles. "Make the logo bigger" only becomes a searchable sentence at that point.
Add the nine Notion pages by address
In "Extract sources", use "Add manually" → "Add URL" and paste each client's page address in, one at a time.
Clean up the client names that split into variants
If "Client A", "ClientA", and "Client A Inc." get picked up separately, the "Synonyms" panel proposes merging the three into one. A person has to confirm it before it lands; nothing gets applied on its own.
After that, the Activity center handles new meeting notes
Write a note and leave it untouched, and an "Build this workspace's knowledge graph?" card appears. Press "Extract" and it catches up on just that note.
How you ask
"What did Client A say about type direction?"
→ 2 decisions, 1 stance.
"Let's go serif for body copy, sans feels too tech."
— said by: Dana · [[ClientA-0312-meeting]]
"Logo wordmark stays sans." — said by: Dana · [[ClientA-0312-meeting]]
"I'm against anything that reads dated." [against] — said by: Theo · [[ClientA-0405-chat]]
Beside the answer sits the mini graph "Where this came from in your notes".
"What decisions changed on the Client A project since the last meeting?"
→ The "Revisions" panel has 1 NEW/REVISES pair waiting for review.
NEW: "Body stays serif, but we widen the tracking." ([[ClientA-0520-meeting]])
REVISES: "Let's go serif for body copy…" ([[ClientA-0312-meeting]])
Press "Confirm" and the March decision renders struck through
with a "Superseded by ClientA-0520-meeting" link.
"Has Client B ever pushed back on logo size?"
→ 1 stance. "The size it's at now feels cramped." [against]
— said by: Ruth · [[ClientB-chat-0218]] (read out of a screenshot)The founder's sentence comes back intact because extraction lifts what the client said into the graph word for word instead of summarizing it, and records who said it alongside. Open the "In your words" section on the "Client A" entity page and the same sentences are grouped under "Decisions", "Open questions", "Claims", "Quotes", and "Stances". Someone else's words carry the speaker's name; stances carry a favor, against, or neutral badge.
Click a [[bracketed]] reference in the answer and the source note opens. Hover a connection chip on the entity page and the sentence is quoted in the form "ClientA-0312-meeting · line 14". Mid-screen-share, you can open that one line and show it.
What changes
| Before | Now |
|---|---|
| "Where did the serif thing come up again?" → scrub the two March files out of 40 voice memos for half an hour | "What did Client A say about type direction?" → three verbatim sentences, each with the speaker's name |
| The evidence lives inside a 47-minute recording, and there's no way to point at it on a screen share | The evidence is "ClientA-0312-meeting · line 14", and one click opens the source note |
| Whether May 20 overturned what March 12 settled comes down to memory | The "Revisions" panel proposes it as a NEW/REVISES pair, and nothing lands until you press "Confirm" |
| Chat feedback is trapped inside a screenshot and doesn't search | The sentence in the bubble searches, carrying its speaker and a favor/against badge |
Back at Tuesday 3pm: mid-screen-share, you can type "what did Client A say about type direction?" into chat and open line 14 of the March 12 note to show her. But only if that meeting was one of the 12 you typed up and put in.