The Top 3 Tools for Designing Remotely
Ten years ago, it was near impossible to find a company willing to hire a designer who was working remotely. Obviously, that is no longer the case. According to this article, the amount of people working remotely in the US has increased a whopping 87% since the pandemic hit last Spring.
Some have adjusted their expectations and adapted to challenges. Others may still be struggling with inadequate tools (we’re looking at you, Microsoft Teams). At Design EyeQ, our remote workflow has become incredibly efficient, largely due to three well-designed, intuitive tools we’ve come to know and trust.
Zoom
If you work remotely and you’re not using Zoom, you’re missing out. Not only has Zoom been rated an industry leader in meeting solutions by the juggernaut analyst firm Gartner, it has also brought us untold amounts of joy in recent days via Lawyer Cat.
Delightful filters aside, Zoom is ideal for designers because it offers the most intuitive visual sharing tools. On a call with upwards of forty people, an engineer can have the CAD model pulled up while our designers make live annotations. Just remember to turn off your notifications while you're sharing your screen. You never know what GIF a team member might send you over Slack while you’re presenting to the CEO. Speaking of Slack...
Slack is the ideal tool for internal communication, period. We are constantly using this software. Because conversations can be easily organized in separate channels, we have different channels for every client, making it easy to track progress on a project. Used in collaboration with Trello -- our favorite project management software -- we have a great system of accountability. Slack also comes built in with direct messages, file sharing and the like. The file sharing is particularly useful for industrial designers. Need to send a 2GB CAD file? Slack can handle that.
Solidworks Project Data Management (PDM).
The design process isn't always linear. That is why it’s absolutely crucial to use software that can easily organize, store, and help manage the revision process. Solidworks PDM gets our vote as the most comprehensive, secure, and user-friendly data management software.
Let’s suppose we’re designing a bottle. When we design the bottle in CAD, we can take multiple snapshots of our bottle and save each snapshot as a revision. We can then split a single revision and have two alternate versions to play around with. We can also “freeze” a version of the bottle so that everyone (except us of course) can see only one revision. It’s also useful to lock other people out of making revisions, whether on purpose or by accident. With that level of control, there’s much less confusion and only the people who need to see the revision have access to it. Now that’s good design.
Solidworks PDM has become our standard for data management, remotely and locally. But especially remotely.
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At Design EyeQ, we have a streamlined remote process using tried-and-true systems. Whether you’re a big company using rusty tech software or a start-up without a clue, you’ll find that our process is efficient, effective, and even a little fun. Contact us to get started on your next project.