Design your way

Tuesday, July 10, 2018

If you’re a designer or a developer, your work involves a certain amount of collaboration with others. Unless it is for your personal use only, a project is rarely a solo effort. Even then, you stand to profit from having one or more extra sets of eyes offering feedback, help, or guidance.

For a studio design project, collaboration is crucial. It can involve internal team members, different agencies, and even external specialists. There’s more to collaborating than simply communicating back and forth, however. Tools are available to manage the effort and make it as efficient and effective as possible.

Here’s a roundup of the best design collaboration tools currently on the market. These tools are designed to make sharing feedback and ideas a breeze. Whether you’re a freelancer or you work in a small agency, this list is for you.

Mason

Imagine designing, building, and deploying a complex digital product from a single platform without having to worry about fragmentation across 3rd party apps or having to rely on prototypes to collaborate with others and wait for their feedback.

Imagine being able to make and publish changes to an already deployed product without having to wait until it’s time for the next deployment cycle.

You no longer have to imagine how things might be with Mason. Mason’s front-end-as-a-service platform lets you do all the above and more on a single platform and in real time. It’s simply a better way to design, build, and deploy a digital product.

Mason is efficient, it’s centralized, designed, and built components can be quickly and easily modified, and the entire process is secure. When you transmit data using Mason, your data end-to-end HTTPS encrypted without hosting. Only you and your need-to-know party have access to the information.

With Mason it’s drag and drop, design, publish, and make changes as and when needed; all from the frontend and all in real time.

monday.com

monday.com is a team management tool that’s equally suitable for two freelancers working together or a world-wide team consisting of thousands. It’s currently in use by 22,000 teams; some working for startups or small agencies, others working for Fortune 500 companies.

monday.com is especially popular for collaborating and sharing information among non-technically oriented teams, as demonstrated by the fact that roughly 70% of the teams using it fall outside the tech sector. It offers an alternative to whiteboard discussions and presentations, searching for information among countless Excel files, and lengthy meetings.

This productivity-boosting team management tool is intuitive to use, centralizes everything to smooth outchaotic work flows and quickly and easily determine who is doing what and when. monday.com promotes transparency and empowers team members by improving team communication and collaboration.

Fleep — Collaboration Software

Fleep is a flexible messenger that integrates with email and makes team collaboration easier and much more efficient. Instead of having to rely on several applications to find out who is doing what and who is communicating with whom, Fleep manages these communications from a single platform.

You can use your Fleep account for team collaboration as well as for communicating with other Fleep users or any other teams with Fleep accounts. Fleep also has lightweight native task management for to-do lists.

All information is stored securely in the cloud, making it readily and easily available on demand. This collaboration tool can be used on a PC, Mac and Linux, or an Android or iPhone device.

Visual Inspector

Collaborating website content with copy writers, design issues with stakeholders, or changes with clients all too often involve back-and-forth communications over screenshot & email, where important information sometimes falls through the cracks.

Visual Inspector is a feedback collaboration tool used by over 40,000+ teams to edit live web pages built with HTML/WordPress or, even at design stage on SketchApp for faster collaboration and decision-making.

Subscribe to monthly plan or grab lifetime access to Pro Plan for one-time payment of $49.

Conclusion

You work hard to set up a smooth-running and effective collaboration network. Due to personnel changes or slip-ups in manual tracking, it doesn’t keep running smoothly forever. You can eventually experience breakdowns.

With the right tool in place, communications breakdowns seldom if ever happen. Any of the tools described here should keep collaboration activities humming along. From an ROI standpoint, any one of them is worth its weight in gold.

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