Comments and Collaboration

Tips for Managing Revisions

My partner, Alex Williams, and I both ran email marketing agencies for over two decades. When we set out to create Denada, we wanted a system that was fast and easy, but we also wanted to make sure that collaboration was built-in and seamless.

In other posts, we’ve talked about how you can use chat to create and then the editor to fine-tune. Now, we’ll focus on how you can share your layouts with your team and other approvers to get their comments and to get that all-important design approved. But first, let’s talk about the revision process.

When I started in the agency world, a creative director at an agency called March First told me “how you manage revisions is everything in the life of a designer.” He taught me a lot of things, but that was one of the most valuable lessons.

Often, when there is no process to manage revisions, projects can drift and get confusing and disorganized. Probably one of the worst things you can do is to simply share things via email or Slack and say “any comments?” Instead, you want to have a separate channel to view a layout and collect comments. If you’re getting revisions via email or Slack, I’ll tell you right now – you’re doing it wrong.

Denada is that separate channel – not only for making layouts but also for collecting edits or revisions.

Revision Rounds

Another important process for getting work approved is to group all of your revisions into rounds. For any given layout, we recommend allowing three rounds with unlimited revisions per round. By grouping revisions into rounds, you and your reviewers have a path to completion. By contrast, if you don’t group them into rounds, they can send revisions in anytime, in any order, and you have no predictable expectation of when the work will be complete.

“We’re done with Round 2; please let us know if you have any other changes or if this is design-approved.”

Sharing in Denada

Once you have your design, simply click “Publish to Web.” This will open your layout in an inbox-simulated webpage. You can share this URL with any of your reviewers.

One thing to know is that you only need to share that URL once – the most up-to-date layout will always be available via that URL. So you can tell your reviewers “here’s the email for review; save this link, and you’ll always see the most up-to-date version.”

One of the time-consuming and needless tasks that creative teams often do is sending back-and-forth proofs for review. They’ll send a PDF once, twice, 8 times; it’s madness! Instead, just share one URL for the life of the project. No need to keep sending additional versions.

Collecting Comments in Denada

Once they have the URL, reviewers can leave comments on any part of the layout. To do that, they simply click the little comment icon on the upper left.

1. Share your layout by clicking “Publish to Web.”

2. Send the URL to reviewers.

3. Collect comments.

4. Review comments, complete them, and mark them off as done or resolved.

5. Update reviewers that Round 1 revisions are complete.

Two Types of Comments: Internal and External

In Denada, there are two types of comments: internal and external.

Internal comments are shared among team members; for example, a copywriter might share a layout with a designer. Within the Denada environment, all comments can be collected and marked as resolved.

This represents an enormous time savings because there is no need to discuss the layout in Slack or email. Instead, Denada is a separate channel for handling all collaboration within the team.

External comments occur once the team is ready and shares the layout with reviewers (described above).

Getting Approval and Locking Your Layout

The designer’s favorite words are “design approved.” In Denada, there is no feature where reviewers can provide approval officially. Instead, they can state approval in the comments or tell you in your daily dialogue.

However, once you get design approval status, you can lock your design. When you lock your design, no further changes can be made within Denada and no further comments can be made. You’re done; congratulations!