Collaborate on Designs With Sympli

Max Ignatyev shows you how to use Sympli to collaborate on web and mobile app designs, and streamline sharing with developers

- Max Ignatyev

Anyone who has worked on a web or mobile app development project has experienced it: the seemingly endless back and forth between developer and designer for all things related to the design. Developers asking for fonts, sizes, positioning and colours. Designers sending the latest updates of images and assets. Files sent via email, Dropbox, Google Drive, Slack – you name it. It’s a messy and time consuming process and, inevitably, things are lost in the shuffle.

Well, we’ve seen it too. So we decided to do something about it with Sympli (app.sympli.io). We wanted to offer a simple way to connect designers and developers so that specifications, assets, notes and information could be easily and automatically shared, and make collaborating with others on a project much more streamlined.

In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to connect your design and development teams quickly and easily by walking through an example in Sympli, Sketch and Xcode. Starting from the point you finish a design project, I’ll explore the next steps from the design team’s perspective and then go through what happens after hand-off to the development team.

Note, I don’t go into creating an account or setting up the plugins, but you can find information about that at sympli.io/downloads/web. While this example uses Sketch and Xcode, Sympli also works with Photoshop and Android Studio, so no matter what your environment, you’re covered.

01 You’ve finished your awesome new app design and are ready to hand the baton off to your development team to implement it. Don’t worry, you don’t need to manually create specification documents, share assets or provide fonts – Sympli automates these tedious manual tasks for you. All you need to do is get your design loaded up in Sketch and make sure you have the Sympli plugin for Sketch installed and working.