We need a “GitHub” for collaborative Design Projects!

I wonder why or how we don’t have a plugin or software done for this yet!

So, GitHub is an online repository for software teams, where the team members can better manage their code, especially with versioning.

As for us designers… Well…

Sure, most design tools out in the market right now allow for collaboration, CMS, prototype sharing, development hand-off, etc…

But what I found that is missing, and especially in my line of work where I have multiple collaborators in a project file, I wished there was a way to create my own “branch”, and the others can also create their own. A lot of design tools these days are done in the cloud, and although Adobe XD (which is almost sunsetting at this point) can make you work on your local machine, and you can create your own prototype links separate to what’s published, it is still not efficient in helping collaborators track who did what, and when, in a project.

My High Level Proposal:

Petition for having collaborator branches in design tools!

Regardless of who the project owner is, for every collaborator added in this file should have the option to have their branches. The project owner should also be able to modify their read/write access, like if they can view the changes done by other collaborators, be able to merge changes, and so forth.

This gives every collaborator the peace of mind that they are not accidentally editing someone else’s work, or overwriting without having it reviewed.

Be able to see who changed what, and when, and depending on your access, able to merge those changes to your own.

Of course, the table above is just a rough idea of seeing what was changed, but ideally, it would be more visual, somewhat like in GitHub, where there is a before and after. And because the branches are separate, the collaborator can also share their own changes before you merge anything.

I believe that collaboration and communication are the most essential to any product team, and through proper management, nothing gets lost and it easy to cycle back and forth through different iterations.

If you like my idea, please feel free to chat, and if anybody wanted to turn this into a real thing I’d totally be onboard to help build it! Anything to make our work more efficient.

THANK YOU FOR READING!