Big and Beautiful Designs
How we’re adding support for Illustrator, and larger Photoshop, and Sketch files in Trunk.
At Trunk we’ve made it easier for designers everywhere to securely version and collaborate on Sketch and Photoshop files. Having access to every revision of your design gives you unprecedented control over the whole creative process, letting you go from wireframes to high fidelity designs all in the one file.
Not a Trunk member? Why not sign up today for free and start syncing your designs!
In a Trunk project you can have a UI design in Sketch, that uses retouched images from Photoshop, and now we’re adding Illustrator support so you can now keep illustrations and logo designs in the same project as well. As part of this effort, we wanted to support collaboration on larger files, regardless of their format. While previous releases limited the size of design files that we would show previews for, with the release of Trunk 0.1.37, we are raising the bar, or more accurately, removing it entirely!
To make this magic happen, hundreds of hours of performance optimization and testing have been completed by the Trunk Engineering team. Read on to discover what this means for you and how the team solved some of the more difficult engineering problems to bring you the smoothest experience ever.
Sketch
Sketch is still our bread and butter, and at Trunk we use it daily in designing our Desktop and Cloud applications while storing and collaborating on these designs in the Trunk app. While the limit was generous, it did not cover those of us working on files with lots of artboards, pages, and rich images. The limit was first introduced because we were not satisfied with the amount of time it takes to create the previews for larger Sketch files. With this release the time taken to preview a file is up to 70% faster than the last release. User experience is very important to us at Trunk, which is why we have also updated our project page so you can see which artboards are changing in real time. No more waiting for the entire process to finish!
Photoshop
We have supported versioning of Adobe Photoshop files from day one, as we feel it’s an important part of many designer’s toolset. Plus, who doesn’t love a game of Photoshop tennis? With this release, we’re doubling down, with the removal of the 100 Megabyte limit, and support for separate previews of Photoshop artboards. To test this, we made sure we put the Trunk App through its paces, including a few games of tennis with gigabyte sized files, which were handled without the app skipping a beat. We also added automated tests to ensure that generating previews continues to work consistently in future releases of Trunk.
Illustrator
Version management of Adobe Illustrator files has been requested since we first launched on Product Hunt, and the team is very excited to announce that it is now a fully supported file format! Now you can store Illustrator, Photoshop, and Sketch files all in the same project, making it easier than ever for design teams to collaborate across multiple formats while always knowing how designs have evolved over time. Like our other two supported formats, Illustrator files are unlimited, so go ahead and throw a few big ones our way.
The magic behind the magic
Trunk is built on top of Git, which is an excellent system for storing and managing changes to files, but due to its distributed nature it can become difficult to manage when larger files are added. We already had some optimizations in place for better support of large files, but with this release we’re going all in on supporting the industry standard Git LFS. This lets us do things like remove the limit on file upload sizes, while still supporting fast downloads and syncing of your Trunk projects. Giving you a faster Trunk; with better and more rich collaboration between you and your teammates.
Because this changes the way files are stored in Trunk, we have introduced an option in all projects to enable this feature. The reason for this is that everyone you collaborate with on the project will also have to be on version 0.1.37 or above to access the design files. For new Trunk projects, the large file optimizations are automatically enabled, so make sure that those you add to the project also have the latest version.
We’re excited to see what you and your teams do now with the unlimited Illustrator, Photoshop, and Sketch support, and hope you enjoy the improved performance and user experience that comes with this update.
Not a Trunk member? Why not sign up today for free and start syncing your designs!
As always please don’t hesitate to reach out to the team via hello@jointrunk.com, or Intercom, we love hearing your feedback and comments.
Chris Berry
Co-Founder and CTO, Trunk
