Abstract

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!

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.

Soooooo should designers github?

Abstract is one of those new product that changed the way we work from day one and we never looked back. Happy to see it available to everyone 👌🏼

Whoops. Were you guys ready for a PH launch? Edit: Solid landing page. Didn't see it before commenting! 👏

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! 🙌🏽