There are some common tasks in almost every graphic designer’s workflow that are made immensely easy by the Internet, but are often clumsy to handle through traditional channels like E-Mail.
Therefore, my question is: Does anybody know good web applications that serve the graphic designer’s workflow? Installable or hosted doesn’t matter, it would be interesting to know about both worlds.
Workflow management:
- Sending sketches to clients without clogging inboxes and sending dozens of cc’s
- Gathering and documenting the client’s feedback to the sketches
Asset management:
- Archiving and labeling finished work
- Archiving and labeling common design elements
- Archiving and labeling third-party work used (Stock images, fonts) and their license agreements
- Optionally: Making all this stuff available to the client through a secure login
I have, for example, used WordPress blogs to interact with clients in the past – every sketch being a blog post, and clients giving their feedback in comments. That is a fairly limited method, though – it would be nice to learn about more specialized products.
What are some good products that provide a solution for all or part of these tasks?
I know there are full-blown agency solutions for every imaginable budget, but I’m more interested in the lower price range and Open Source solutions.
Answer
For lightweight usage, I love Dropbox.
I can create a folder for a particular project, and then share just that one folder with those who need to get into it. They can’t see folders I haven’t given them access to.
Dropbox syncs in the background, so I know they’ll always have the very latest. I have my Mac set up to notify me if anything in the folder changes, so I’m alerted if/when they change something.
It also does a small amount of lightweight version control, which can come in handy.
Price: $0, which gets you a fairly reasonable amount of space. You can pay more if you need more, but I never have.
If you don’t have a Dropbox account, you should.
And I guess that means I should include the obligatory kickback link. No obligation, of course. But you will love it.
Attribution
Source : Link , Question Author : Pekka , Answer Author : Dori
