Project Management for Designers

Allworkedup manages the design process as you’d expect it to.

The process starts by creating a project, ths involves giving it a name, a project description (if you want to) and assigning a colour to the project (this helps distinguish it in the system, but can also give it relevant brand colours etc). Once this is done you’ll be taken to the new project and given a few prompts.

The first prompt asks you to add some project members. You can either add new members to the system (who will be notified with login details) or choose from existing members from other projects. You can then assign project permissions to those members by clicking on the permissions tab and choosing the relevant level. All members you add start of as, well, members (can leave feedback) and can be upgraded to leaders (can add other members), designers (can add new members and manage designs) or managers (can manage the project details, comments, designs and members). Members will be notified when added to a project and when their permissions change.

Once you have some members (they can be added at any time by the way), you can go ahead and upload your designs. When you click on ‘add design’ you’ll see that you only have to fill in the name and upload a flat creative (jpg, gif or png) at first. There are several configurable options such as background image (jpg, gif or png), background colour and design position – these are all optional. One feature of the design uploader is the instant design preview which builds as you complete the form giving you a scaled down representation of the design as it would appear in the browser. At the bottom of the form you’ll see ‘notifications’. This is set to send all members (except you) a notification email by default but can be easily altered to send to the members of your choice (which of course includes you).

Once a design is uploaded you’ll see it appear in the thumbnail area at the top of the project page with a useful quick nav (with options for viewing previous versions, adding a comment, viewing and editing). Your members will be notified and will login to the system to leave their feedback. Leaving feedback is simple, give you comment a title, leave you comment, upload an attachment if you like and notify the other members. All the time you make actions on the system it’s recorded in the project feed along with the member comments – a chronological account of project activity.

As you continue the design process Allworkedup echoes your actions, be it updating a design (and creating a new version automatically whenever the main creative is changed), adding or responding to feedback, adding new members or even exporting the project for archiving.

This is the core of the system – design presentation, client feedback and design versioning working in tandem with your offline process.