freelanceswitch.com: With collaboration services being one of the most in demand in today’s web-specific market, there have emerged a considerable number of online tools that help to ease the process of creative work.
The project collaboration app segment isn’t an exception here in any way. Freelance designers need convenient tools for communicating with their clients and getting sign-off on creative projects. Also, teams require reliable instruments that enable their online collaborative design work.
7 comments:
We were talking about some of these products in my color theory class today actually. Client sign off is one of the most important aspects to people doing graphic media management, and considering how much of what we do in theatre has to do with color, it can be equally important to us sometimes. Picking a software package that can accurately depict the final product and ensure sign off the removes liability is paramount, and I think some of these software titles can enable that, for free, which is cool.
One thing that makes me question these software is how accessible it is for team members? Can you expect going into a process and have people to conform to your software or your way of doing things? Not always. Yes a =n app could work for you, but what about your team or clients. As a designer they are always changing. I dont know if it would be useful to buy software you may not use.
You know, we see this kind of article all the time on the green page and I think, while each site encourages different software (this site recommends conceptshare, invisionapp; in the past we have seen recommendations such as google, even Skype) each freelance individual or company needs to decide for themselves and needs to decide how many apps or programs the company is willing to simultaneously support. More programs means more training, especially if, as Dev touches on, they are not applications that are common or well-known. I think the take-away from these types of articles is that you just have to do what works best for you, whether it is complex capability or a breadth of users, it all comes down to what you want to use your tools for.
Apps and off client programs have become a bigger and bigger part of my life as I venture further and further into my theater carrier. I downloaded etc's off client program for the eos family on my PC and I was actually able to patch most of the conventionals in a show at home in bed then plug my flash drive into the board the next day. I would not recommend patching intelligent lighting on the off client console. I agree with Dev that it would not be fare to expect a production team to have access to the same software as a single designer might, but that does not mean that these programs could not still be really useful for a production.
In this day and age we often find that the only way to get collaborative work done is online. And although I personally prefer to work with other people in person, I think that as a second choice it's important to have a well designed piece of software.
This list of 16 software packages is useful in some way, for example informing the reader about useful software that is otherwise hard to find out about. On the other hand the writing about each of the programs is minimal and doesn't tell the reader very much about the software. All of the descriptions were very similar with things like markup tools, PDF, and commenting showing up in almost all of the programs. It would be more helpful to hear about the down sides and differences to the programs.
All I really learned for this list is the names of a handful of programs that may or may not be helpful to me on group projects. I am planing on looking up these programs to learn more about them and how I can make use of them in my daily life.
I had never heard of any of these products. I am curious to see how they progress in both technology and popularity. I totally agree with Jon Mark's notes on color - which presents a huge problem with many products. I'm not sure if the fact that I've never heard of a single one speaks to their effectiveness or not. How many people use the app does impact how useful it is. Of course I am not the judge of how common they are.
SO, who knows a good software designer? Maybe it's out there, but I have yet to come across collaborative design software specifically designed for AutoCAD and I don't see .dwg in any of the supported file types in this list. This could be my million dollar idea for the day! AutoCAD does make an app that sort of lets you share drawings with people, but not very effectively. Currently we keep drawings for SOD on the drama server in an infrastructure that we set up ourselves and that often gets messy as deadlines come and go and people take over projects. Wouldn't it be great if there was a kind of cloud based, online storage service, like Google Docs, but for AutoCAD drawings, accessible from anywhere, with it's own file structure for projects, that automatically created a new file whenever anyone changed something in a drawing, and included dates and times and initials and all the things we've come to use with other programs like word and acrobat. With all the folks that use CAD and programs like it, I think this type of site could be popular and lucrative. Let's get on it people!
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