Abstract brings git-inspired version control & collaboration to your design team. Centralize design decisions, feedback, and files. Integrates with Sketch & Adobe XD.
Thanks @bentossell for hunting us!
My name is Josh Brewer CEO and co-founder at Abstract. We are happy to finally show the world what we’ve been working on.
Engineers have GitHub. Sales teams live in Salesforce. Even our friends in marketing have embraced Marketo as their home. What about us designers?
When you think about it, designers are a pretty flexible bunch. We're willing to do whatever it takes to bring great ideas to life. We have workarounds. Not workflows.
It’s clear that we need help managing the rest of our work. Team coordination, collaborating with stakeholders, and interpreting feedback are part of the design process. Designers have long wished for a system of record like what developers have come to rely upon with Github. We need a secure, reliable, stable place we can call home for our design work.
We’ve spent the last year designing and building Abstract. Welcome home.
We'll be here all day to answer any questions you might have, so ask away!
@jbrewer Thank you for the amazing work behind Abstract. I've been using for some time now (Private Alpha) and we love how easy is to keep track of our design updates.
@jbrewer - we've been on the Alpha for a short while at Typeform, and OMG, this is THE killer application for having your Designs as well organised and version controlled as your code. There is like no other application that is close. Not even a little bit close. You guys have nailed it. There is not enough superlatives to go around, it's simply da 💥
Abstract is without question the best way to manage design files. Full stop.
A saved and synced file this is not. It’s a whole new way to consider design files, how they evolve, and how other stakeholders interact with those files.
If you’re a designer looking for something more than just dumb files and destructive versioning, this is finally your day in the sun.
@imvasyl@kvnsmth I really want there to be some github'esque integration. Not sure how it would work though. Do viewers (developers) get the ability to download files?
@kenrossi we have some ideas around other integrations but nothing concrete to share yet. Definitely hit us up on feedback@goabstract.com with any ideas you have!
Viewers can both look at the files in Abstract (desktop and web) and open/download from desktop.
Before Abstract, a non-insignificant amount of our Design workflow was spent managing files. Right-click, duplicate, rename. The struggle is real, and every designer knows it well. It's a waste of time, void of context, and a disk-space vampire. Engineers solved this problem years ago with tools like Git and Subversion. It's time Designers had their own version-control renaissance. That time is now, and the team at Abstract is leading the charge. Abstract has freed us to focus on Design, not file management.
We've been using Abstract at Mesosphere now for close to a year, and it has truly changed the way we work. Every project we work on goes through Abstract. Designers on the team make branches for working changes and new features. It's an excellent way to not only store our files, but keep everyone up-to-date with all work in progress.
I don't know if we could ever go back to a world where our team was working in Google Drive or Dropbox.
Our team at Canvas has been using the alpha for the last 3-4 months and we absolutely love it. Congrats to the Abstract team for the public launch, beautiful new website as well! 🙌🏽
We have been using Abstract in our small team of 3 designers for almost 7 months now, i think i forgot how to work without it. It's just amazing how you can have in a single place all the projects, follow the status on each, check what was changed and why. Great tool, looking forward for more cool stuff.
Our team started using Abstract last August, when the updates were zip files that we'd install from AWS. We've stuck with it and saw it grow, and I can say it's changed just about everything about our process. Also, the seamless integration with Sketch basically put the nail in the coffin for using any Adobe apps. Kudos team! It's been awesome to see the product come around.
We're using Abstract for three months now. I honestly don't want to go back to how it was before 🙏 Great product with a great team! I can recommend it to anyone working on digital products. Doesn't matter if you're a designer, developer, project manager, etc...Just give it a spin!
I've only used it for a little while, but I like Abstract as a management system for polished assets and final designs. I haven't gotten used to using it for design files that are sketches or explorations. Curious to know if other Abstract adopters are going all-in?
@jringenberg all in for sure. The best part of the explorations side is doing it via branches so that you can explore, walk back the whole version history if you’re curious, and never worry about deleting old files in the “Archive” page of your Sketch doc, only to want to see them again later.
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Though it's well designed, the product isn't ready for paying customers by a long margin.
Pros:Addresses a big need - organization of design files
Cons:Too many bugs, very slow, high resource usage
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