12 January 2016

6 Collaborative Tools to Increase Visual Communication and Productivity

Design is a collaborative process and very rare do we as designers create alone. For most of us who are lucky to work in a supportive and a creative environment, it is highly productive to be able to gather feedback.

As important as the tools we use to create, today we’ll be looking at some awesome tools to help simplify the flow of gathering information. If you or your team are still in the ages of manually highlighting details using Powerpoint slides or (kill me) Word, it’s best if you started exploring the list below.

Red Pen

List: 6 Design Tools to Increase Communication and Productivity

This might be the fastest way to get feedback on your designs. As a super basic Web app that lets you upload a file and share it with clients and team members, it’s main feature is that it’s extremely light-weight (zero setup time). If you’re like me and hate emailing large files back and forth, you’ll want to check out Red Pen.

Hightail

List: 6 Design Tools to Increase Communication and Productivity

Share files, get feedback and take projects from concept to completion, Hightail allows creative collaboration that leaves behind email. It unites everyone in your team—from creator to client, PM to CMO—in one intuitive platform. The Lite version which allows 5 spaces is Free.

Codesign

List: 6 Design Tools to Increase Communication and Productivity

This web app helps designers keep the feedback process clean, fast and organized. It’s a minimal project management for web-development and graphical-design that requires no prototyping. Codesign’s primary focus is to discuss and to point out fixes to be done. To put it simple, Codesign is “Invision on diet” — keeping the app as simple, as natural and as “fit” with features as possible.

Kivo

List: 6 Design Tools to Increase Communication and Productivity
The simplest way to work with someone else on a file. Kivo is a collaboration layer that sits on top of existing storage platforms and allows multiple people to edit a file at the same time regardless of file type or storage layer.

Wake

List: 6 Design Tools to Increase Communication and Productivity
As a private space to share and discuss design work with your team, Wake works on the web, desktop and mobile platform. It’s super easy for designers to share, enabling a more open and transparent design process. You can also shoot photos of analog work with the iPhone app and easily collaborate if you’re working remotely.

Relay.io

List: 6 Design Tools to Increase Communication and Productivity
If your design team uses Slack – the a cloud-based messaging app/collaboration tool, you can thank the stars for Relay. Synced with Slack, you can use Relay to capture screens directly from Adobe CC, Sketch, Chrome and share work in progress while discussing design with your team.

So there you have it guys, let us know in the comments which tool you and your team uses and if I’m missing out on more resources!