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There's tremendous value in the history of a design file. Virtually every design agency I've worked for has had the need to write case studies based on work the
by cantlin 14y ago
There's tremendous value in the history of a design file. Virtually every design agency I've worked for has had the need to write case studies based on work they've done. "Showing your workings" is also a powerful tool for demonstrating to clients the value for money they're getting. Finally, I can imagine such history being an invaluable aid for junior designers trying to learn from their seniors; it potentially transforms a nebulous process that is very hard to inspect (except by direct observation) into one that can be widely examined by distributed users.
What I'm unclear on is how the nitty gritty of the versioning actually operates. For example, most designers would attest to heading down many "dead ends" that may only ever live in RAM. Can services like this snapshot those interim states, or do they only capture changes to files on disc? Some experienced designers will also likely do their own primitive versioning by saving a design out to different paths as they go (home_v1.psd, home_v2.psd...). Can Pixelapse et al handle this user behaviour, or does it require people to change their workflow? If the latter, is an analogous feature available to allow designers to mark major version increments?
In many ways it ultimately feels that "files in folders" is a broken way to handle designs, units of design and design projects on a computer. I applaud attempts to supersede it. As long as Photoshop thinks in terms of files though, it will be a difficult space to innovate.
- JangoSteve 14y agoWe just recently started using Pixelapse a week and a half ago, so I can answer a couple of these. There is an app that runs in the menu bar of our designer Kevin's mac, which automatically uploads "revisions" of the design he's working on. It only captures changes to the file on disk, so he has to save strategically knowing that it will create a "revision". I personally don't like this, as it discourages saving often. To be fair, you can mark different revisions as "milestones", but this just seems like a bandaid for this particular problem. Before using Pixelapse, Kevin had his own workflow (similar to what you mentioned), where he'd save different versions of a design as project_homepage_option1.jpg, project_homepage_option2.jpg, etc. Pixelapse absolutely does not support this. It will upload each one as a different file and offers no way to combine them so that you can compare them for review (and there is no way in Pixelapse to compare different files, only different revisions of the same file. Also keep in mind that Pixelapse, along with every other similar app I looked at, uses the revision/history paradigm for comparing designs. But I think Pixelapse at least allows for the non-timeline-based approach a bit better than others, though it still didn't quite fit our workflow without some changes to our workflow. Edited to clarify, I wasn't trying to be too critical of Pixelapse. I actually really like it, it just required some changes to our workflow to be effective, and I think we're still trying to figure a couple things out.
- cantlin 14y agoThanks Steve, interesting stuff. It feels like revision-on-save is a significant limitation; I wonder if they have plans to tackle this in future.