Version Control for Designers

Long time we did not write anything here. Perhaps it is time to fill this annoying gap. Moreover, the reason is more than worthy.

Since the last post, the PICS.IO service has become a full-fledged media management system. Now, in addition to photos, many graphic formats are supported, as well as video and audio files. But today we are not talking about this, but about how we ourselves use the service in work.

A team of six is ​​working on the product. We have developers, coder, designer and even a marketer. In fact, this is a typical set of competencies that are needed for the development of any software, whether for order or for yourself. Everything that relates to working with the code is, as expected, under the control of GitHub. And that's good, we like it. But when it comes to design, everything is a little sadder.
')
Initially, we used Skype for intra-team communication. Our designer, Lesha, threw design options into the general chat, we discussed them there and sent Vovan into the layout. Very quickly this chat turned to hellish soup from discussions and pictures. That's when we tried to make Lesha use GitHub. It was not easy. He did not want to understand in any way why he needed to use this thing, which was made by programmers for other programmers. In the end, Alex won, and we buried the idea of ​​using Github for design.

Then we discovered Slack. Everything was perfect in it: we singled out a separate channel to discuss the design and continued to work. I must say that in two months he differed little from the original situation with Skype. The same hellish soup that can't be sorted out. After a couple of times Vova took the old design and folded the wrong version, it finally became clear that something had to be changed.

In general, the story described above is quite typical for any company where there is at least one designer. Things are proportionally worse if there are more than one designers. PICS.IO quite actively use several creative agencies and we know about these problems firsthand. In the end, we persuaded our Lesha to put new designs in PICS.IO. As they say - eat your own dog food! Immediately after that, we found out that the design is, in fact, not just a PSD or AI file, it is also a history of changes, plus comments. Then we just added it to our product. So it turned out the simplest in the world, and, perhaps, the best, version control system for designers. Here's how it works now:



What it gives:

• the designer removes from the computer an army of files creating unnecessary chaos
• everyone on the team automatically sees the latest version of each of the files.
• You can always see which version exactly the comments belong to, since discussion and revisions are now in a single thread
• everything that the designer does automatically enters the cloud, and therefore is not subject to system failures and other force majeure

The beauty of the solution is that in PICS.IO you can add not only ready-made designs, but also other files that are needed to work on them: photos, video and audio purchased on the stock, illustrator layouts and even pdfs with briefs on what needs to be done. All this is neatly stored and versioned directly into Google Drive.

We had an idea to make a payment on projects, like most GitHub clones, but we refused it. Designers often have a library of blanks and files that they use in different projects, and the project itself often consists of a single PSD or AI file. Perhaps for this reason, the people who work on the design are not keen on using Git-alike tools.

And finally, about one more small, but nice feature. If you have a lot of projects in one repository, then it’s quite difficult to look in the folder tree every time, where you need to add a new version of your work. We made it so that when you drag a file into pics.io, and the file with the same name already exists, the system prompts you to add a new revision and put it where necessary.

We will be very happy if PICS.IO comes in handy in your work with designers. Here is the link that you can send to your familiar designer - pics.io/design-ru . And even if he does not speak Russian, you can still send him or her such a link - pics.io/design .