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by jongold 5400 days ago
Looks great - designers desperately need a better solution for versioning. My thoughts on existing options:

- Dropbox isn't great because (as far as I know) you don't get to leave messages as you do with Git/SVN commits.

- Git isn't great because (as far as I know) it's not so easy to quickly compare a whole history of iterations

- I haven't looked at hosted options for a few months, but they've always seemed to be expensive.

So you're left with:

- Trying to remember to incrementally increase filenames (Website01.psd, Website02.psd etc) - still leaving out memorable 'commit messages'.

- Saving the files with memorable 'commit messages' in the filename (Website_WideSidebar.psd, Website_NarrowSidebar.psd). Janky.

- Grouping all of your layers and duplicating the entire site for different iterations, turning on and off those groups to see previous work. Or using Layer Comps. Still janky.

- What I do in Illustrator (infinite canvas makes it easier than in Photoshop) - duplicating the artboard for each iteration, leaving a 'post-it note' to myself on the corner of each iteration. So I get the 'commit messages' and the ability quickly see all iterations at once. A recent example: http://c.jongold.in/1z452Y402o3V3s2d0r2W

I'd agree with the previous criticism about the video being too long - I'm sure you're aware of that though.

The pressing issue in versioning for me is being able to leave and view 'commit messages'/comments as simply as I can with Git - they're more meaningful to me that viewing solely by date. If you add that I think you'll have a great product.

1 comments

We've toyed with the idea of doing commit messages, but we're holding off on them for now. A commit message is a way of explaining the behavior of the changes in (usually) code. When working with images though, the changes in design are readily visible. In a way, the commit message is contained within the image itself.

That being said, we may explore the options of a 2-up view in the future or a Github-style image diffing mechanism.

Agreed. We all end up naming our designs Index_01.psd, Index_01a.psd, .. anyway. I don't think commit messages are that important in design.