monströös Animation Studio

monströös is a leading studio for 2D Animation and audiovisual storytelling based in Berlin. As a growing team with an expanding client base, monströös found that many of their home-grown processes couldn’t hold up to their pace of growth and consumed too many resources along the way. monströös founder Mareike Graf reached out to me to automate some project management tasks. We ended up working on so much more than that.

monströös’s digital environment was the result of years of development and improvement. Though functional for the founding team, new employees found it hard to navigate the plethora of apps, drives and tools. Information was scattered over platforms like Dropbox Paper, Google Sheets, Shared Calendars and Slack and multiple file storing systems. Finding information often times relied on asking project drivers on Slack or in person. It was clear, that monströös needed a Notion environment that functions as a single source of truth and that made the flow of information from project to admin teams easier.

We started by mapping key processes within the studio and their respective bottlenecks with special attention to the handover of information between teams and clients. This aspect was key to create a sleek and customized Notion environment from scratch.

The Notion Environment of monströös consists of several Teamspaces, a backend structure including deeply interlinked databases, dashboards on individual, team, project and company level, Wiki and static info pages as well as automated, semi-automated and manual process structures.

Front and center of their new company operating system in Notion is the company dashboard that functions as a welcome place for your workday. From here you get easy access to next meetings and projects and pages with important information that is frequently needed.

Quick links take team members quickly to their personal Notion spaces, including dashboards specifically filtered for their needs and project involvements, including project management, tasks, time tracking, notes & documents and others.

A handy Action section is always in reach that let you create new projects, offers or CRM entries with a click of a button.

As monströös is in a growth phase, we identified the rapidly filling sales funnel as bottleneck in the company’s landscape that included management of new clients, contact persons and project requests.

In the past, company information and client contacts were scattered over individual email accounts and contact books. Also information on project remained unstructured and often times referenced from email conversation, physical notebooks or memory.

It was our aim to make the process as sleek and organized as can be, so information is stored in a central place, that can be accessed by anyone and reused over the course of project acquisition and beyond. Now, a central dashboard gives overview about the different stages of the project acquisition funnel.

Moreover, we created a dynamic Project Template, that guides the users through the entire process: From creating a new entry for a project request and gathering the necessary information, creating a project offer, managing the offers, project planning and project execution.

This structure ensures, that all necessary information is in place at the right moment of the lifecycle without overwhelming the user.

It was important, that client documents sent from e-mails be stored at a central place that can easily be found. For maximum convenience, a dropbox folder for these documents can easily be created from within Notion by pressing a button. The button triggers a Make.com scenario via a webhook and creates the folder in the right place.

Offers for animation projects require a plethora of specialized information to get right to create a sound offer. In a custom view, we bite-sized the needed information and made them easy to input via multi-select fields.

The guided project creation processes ensures that

With all necessary information in place, the project owner is now ready to create an offer. And it is no less than magical.

Previously, offers were created manually through a InDesign template. This process was cumbersome and error-prone. Now, offers can be created at the push of a button.

First, a custom template ensures, that all necessary information for the offer is in place or can easily be added on the go. Additionally a consecutive offer number is automatically created through an automation.

But the real magic lies in the handover of the project data to create an offer automatically in Google Docs. With just a click, all the relevant information is placed in the right spots of the template and the link is added to the offer database.

From here, the offers can be manually adjusted if necessary and saved as a PDF when ready.

But it doesn’t end here. We made sure to account for the entire lifecycle of the project acquisition by putting follow-up reminders for project drivers in place and allow for easy status updates from within the project template itself.

So for example, when the offer results in a new project, right from the template a new project folder can be created in Dropbox along with a project number.

A running project can easily be handled from the project dashboard, which includes overviews of

With no dedicated team yet, administrative tasks are handle by two of the seven studio founders themselves. This includes bookkeeping, writing and keeping track of offers, cashflow forecasts and the like.

In it’s growth phase, admin tasks represent a major obstacle for the studio, as all hands are needed for the creative video creation process. Hence, we aimed to make the handover between project teams and admin teams as straightforward as can be.

In the past, the process was hindered by scattered and not up-to-date information, that required a lot of back and forth communication between the project driver and the admin team. Now we made sure, that the admin team can pull the necessary information for billing from a central place and is automatically informed, when a new invoice is due to be sent out.

In its own dashboard, the admin team has a direct overview about the status all offers and and invoices and saves valuable time. All the information for invoicing and follow-ups are in one place and ready to be acted on.

An project the size of monströös’ new Notion environment comes with a lot of hurdles. We went through extensive testing to make sure, the designed processes and dashboards reflect the needs of the teams.

It was also important to me as a former designer, to create self-explanatory interfaces that can be used by non-Notion experts as well. For this reason, more complicated processes like the Project creation process are equipped with in-template documentation and explanation for first time users.

Moreover, I created a video tutorial series specifically for monströös’ workspace.

With their new Notion-powered operating system, monströös has transformed the way they work. Project requests are now processed faster, client information is always up-to-date, and offer creation takes minutes instead of hours. The team no longer wastes time searching for scattered documents—every project, invoice, and admin task is neatly organized and accessible at a glance.

Since implementing these changes, the studio has reduced administrative workload, allowing more time for what they do best: creating stunning hand-crafted animations. The improved project acquisition and CRM workflows have also led to a smoother onboarding of new clients and a clearer overview of ongoing deals. With automation taking care of repetitive tasks, monströös is now scaling with confidence—without getting bogged down by operational chaos.