Design is more of a collaborative process than we often realize. In the process of designing a new site, logo, promotional flyer, and more, you’ll often end up emailing dozens of files back and forth with your coworkers and clients to see what they think about the changes. Adding to that, you’ll usually end up emailing copies of PSD or AI files, links to similar designs that inspired you, or reminders for when parts of the project are due. Before you know it, you’re struggling to find the right file among dozens of similar emails.
Your team needs a better way to collaborate on the design process. Today we’re going to look at Draftboard, a new webapp that lets you compare and annotate design drafts, send ideas and inspirational links to your team, and store your important project files together. It’s a light project management app that’s solely focused on design drafts and your team’s feedback. Let’s see if this is the app that can make your creative process flow smoother.
Setting Up a Draftboard Project
When you’re ready to start collaborating on your creative designs, head over to Draftboard’s website and signup for a new account. There’s a wide variety of plans available, from a free plans with a generous 1 Gb of file storage up to a Corporate plan with unlimited projects, users, and 80Gb of storage for $99/month. All plans have a free 30 day trial, so you can try out any plan you want and then adjust to the plan that will work best for your team.
When you signup for a plan, you’ll choose a unique subdomain for your projects. This will make it easy to share your projects with your clients with an easy to remember URL.
Choose the plan that fits your team, from a generous free plan to one that can handle the largest firm
Seconds later, you’ll be ready to get started sharing designs with Draftboard. Your main dashboard page will normally show the latest updates from your projects, but on your first login it’ll show some getting started info that will help you learn your way around the app quickly. Everything in Draftboard is contained in projects, so to get started you’ll need to click Create a Project.
Learn your way around Draftboard quickly
Add a New Project
Creating a new project is simple. Just add a name for the project, then select your client company for the project so you can control who has access this project. If you haven’t added clients yet, just leave the Access menu at the default entry, and you can change this in your project settings later.
Get started on your first project in seconds
Now you’ll see your new project complete with an overview dashboard, as well as pages for inspirational design links, draft designs, and important project files. Drafts is the most important part of the app; you’ll see your latest drafts on the dashboard, as well is individual iterations of a draft from the drafts page.
Each project has room for design drafts, inspiration links, and files for the design
Add People & Personalize Your Account
Before you get too much stuff going, you’ll want to have your team ready to work with you. Click on the Settings link in the top left to open your Draftboard account settings. Here you can invite coworkers or clients to collaborate with you on your projects, so they can view and comment on projects, add their own drafts, and more. Once you’ve added collaborators, you can specify who has access to which projects and keep everything working on their specific projects. You can also add your company’s logo to a project to keep your firm’s branding consistent.
Add collaborators and clients to your projects, and personalize them with your brand.
Add Drafts & Collaborate on Design
Once you’ve added coworkers, you’re ready to start designing. Open the drafts tab, then click Add a Draft on the right side. You can upload a PNG, JPG, or GIF formatted image of your site, design, or whatever you’re working on, then add a description and name.
Upload images of drafts quickly
Now, everyone on your account can see your draft and leave a comment about it. If you want to add more thoughts about specific parts of the design, click Add Note, then drag the yellow square to the area you want to note and enter a message in the black box. You’ll then be able to see everyone’s notes on the design to make your next drafts better.
View the full image, then add notes and highlights to add your thoughts about the design
As your project progress, you can upload new revisions of your design. Each version will still be visable from the sidebar, and all comments from each revision will still be visible from the bottom of the page. Whenever a design meets everyone’s approval, click the green Approve button. Alternately, let your coworkers know you don’t like the design by clicking Decline. After several iterations, you should be able to see both how your project progressed over time and what everyone’s thoughts on the process were.
Comment, add tasks, upload new drafts, and view older ones all on the same page
You won’t need to stick with one design style, though. Draftboard lets you add as many different drafts as you want, each with its own revisions, comments, and more. You’ll be able to get a quick glance at how each project and draft is progressing from the Overview page as more revisions, comments, files, and more are added. Draftboard works great for revising and getting feedback on project drafts, and makes it easy to see what’s going on at a glance.
As your project progresses, your Overview page will come alive with drafts and activity
Stay Inspired & Keep Up With Your Files
Draft copies of your designs aren’t the only thing your team will need to keep up with. Draftboard also lets you add important files from the Files tab. This is a great place to add all the PSD, AI, CSS, and other files you’ll be using in the design. Unfortunately, though, you can’t preview the files without downloading them, and there’s no way to organize your files. Additionally, uploading larger files often failed in our tests. You can also add plain links to the Inspiration tab, though again, this only shows the links and site title, and you’ll have to click through to actually see the site. These parts of the app could definitely use some more attention.
Quickly find all of your important project files
Conclusion
If you’re looking for a way to keep your designs together and collaborate on drafts without emailing files back and forth, Draftboard may be a good solution for your team. While in many ways the app is basic, it does work well for adding multiple drafts of a project, getting feedback, and, to a lesser degree, sharing files. It’s still much more streamlined than the haphazard approach of emailing pictures and files back and forth. It’s quick and easy to use, and works great for marking up draft designs. Best of all, you can easily try it out for free with the basic plan or a free 30 day trial of any account, and see if it works good for your team.
