Merging Designs in Abstract — Part 2

1: Update from Master
2: Resolve merge conflicts — you’re here 📍
3: Cleaning up your branch

When you’re working together on designs, conflicts are natural — you can reduce how many you see, but it’s likely that you’ll still come across a few from time to time. Regardless, conflicts can be stressful, so here’s a straightforward guide on how to resolve them.

Which artboards should you choose to keep?

You might be wondering how this choice will impact the rest of the project. When you see the update branch screen and you select the artboard(s) that you want to keep, those artboards will replace the ones in your current branch.

Choosing the artboards from master

If you choose the artboard(s) from the master (or parent branch), the work that you had done in your branch will be overwritten by what you saw on the conflict screen. You might need to do a little bit of work in your files after your branch has been updated in order to get some of your designs back. The benefit of choosing master is that you know you won’t overwrite someone else’s work — you take it upon yourself to do the fixing.

Choosing the artboards from your current branch

If you choose the artboard(s) from your current branch or child branch, your artboards will remain how they were in your branch; you can continue to design in your files and you won’t have to do anything to get your previous designs back. However, this is a conscious choice to overwrite the updates that your teammate had made to master, and you won’t have another opportunity to choose their designs. In this case, make sure that you know which designs belong in master. (You can still fix it later if you discover that you should have chosen the master version.)

For each conflict, you can choose individual artboards to keep by clicking Pick Layer below the artboard you want. Continue this process until all conflicts are resolved.

When resolving multiple conflicts, you also have the option to choose batches of artboards to keep. For each of these batches, you must choose either everything on master or everything on your current branch.

There are three options for batch resolving conflicts:

• All items on this page
• All items in this file
• All items in this update

After making your selection and resolving all conflicts, you will be prompted to confirm and commit.

How to work around merge conflicts

If you’ve done a lot of work in your branch that you don’t want to be overwritten but you’re not certain whether you should ignore the changes on the master or parent branch, there’s a way to keep both options until you’re ready to reconcile them.

1. After entering the update branch screen, take note of the artboards that have merge conflicts.
2. Click the blue X to close out of the update branch flow.
3. In your branch’s file(s), make duplicates of the artboards that had conflicts.
4. Close the file(s).
5. Go back to the update branch flow by clicking the Update from Master… button again.
6. This time, select all the artboards from master and confirm the update.
7. Your file will now have the updates from master on the original artboards and your designs on the duplicated artboards.

Part 3: Cleaning up your branch →

Originally published at https://www.abstract.com.