GIT For Designers Might Be Here…. To Stay

The Dilemma
Designers (Onyekachi) spend days on a design project and the only evidence of productivity to show is that file name that resembles ***(app_design_beta_final_final_copy_update2)***. There’s really nothing that helps you track your progress in the program or remotely give you an idea of how efficiently you’ve utilized your time in sketch. It gets even more stressful when you have to comb through 5 pages and 100 artboards to make minor changes because a colleague (or your cat) mistakenly pressed the delete button.
It gets even more stressful when you have to comb through 5 pages and 100 artboards to make minor changes because a colleague (or your cat) mistakenly pressed the delete button.

At other times the process of splitting design projects amongst a design team gets extremely tedious as every file is being designed in isolation and there’s no way of merging them, measuring productivity or efficiently tracking changes. current solutions (in my case) involve littering your files across multiple platforms (Dropbox paper, flash drives etc) and God help you there’s a lazy person on your team that makes iterations without updating the file name
The Solution
I’ve spent the larger portion of this year begging my developer friends to create a git for designers, they laugh at me and explain how hopeless the situation is (yes I’m talking to you Oghenejirhevwe and you too Jude). Thankfully the people at abstract don’t share the same views. I was skeptical to try the product ( I have tried some in the past that were a complete waste of time) but Dann Petty recommended it. Something about the page got me to sign up and yesterday I finally decided to try it out, 1 branch, 2 commits and over 22 non visual changes later I’m happy to say IT’S THE REAL DEAL. Abstract is not yet perfect but it has set the pace for a beautiful future of collaborative design.
1 branch, 2 commits and over 22 non visual changes later I’m happy to say IT’S THE REAL DEAL

The workflow is really simple:
- Set up a project (a master file) by creating a new sketch file or updating an existing one
- Create a branch where iterations can be made (sub -branches can also be created) start designing independently
- A collaborator can create a new branch and start working on another section of the project
- Save changes by creating a commit through sketch, all changes visual and non visual are tracked and displayed for all collaborators to see (and in the case of a product manager to approve)
- The approved changes can then be merged into the master file and everyone can create updated branches.
- go into the world and preach the gospel of abstract
Thank you Abstract! I hope you consider making a free version soon!

