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Ask DN: Sketch + Github?

9 years ago from , Senior Product Designer at Dialpad; formerly Stack Overflow

Some of us on the design team at Stack Overflow are using Sketch more and are considering using something like git to store our files instead of Google Drive or Dropbox.

Can anyone share experiences they've had with Sketch files in git repos? Does it merge the files well? Any "gotcha's" I should know about?

Thanks!

5 comments

  • Pasquale D'SilvaPasquale D'Silva, 9 years ago (edited 9 years ago )

    Merging design files doesn't ever really work. It's one thing merging lines of logic in code... but it's another when you're dealing with something far more abstract.

    Phil: removed the header and made the body bright pink

    Danny: created a new header, changed the bg to a tiling pattern and sidebar and changed some text

    How do you merge these two changes in a document?

    I used to use Git for storing sketch files, but it became such a pain to retrieve them.

    I want to get away from dropbox, or have a layer on top where I can manually create commit snapshots, instead of saving every single command + s.

    1 point
    • Joshua HynesJoshua Hynes, 9 years ago

      Sigh. That's what I was afraid of. We're using Google Drive right now. I think we just be better off creating separate files that we work on locally and then merge them manually when a milestone is achieved. Or one file is the main file and we just pull different changes into the main file.

      0 points
      • Pasquale D'SilvaPasquale D'Silva, 9 years ago

        Honestly, that's the only way it can be. Having a computer make the calls on merging design decisions would be insanity.

        That's one of the things I figure will be always come down to two humans communicating.

        That being said, I'd love a way to link 'forked' files to each other. Right now, I create a copy of the file, and add a human friendly name to describe the major change.

        E.g. Homepage-005 -> Homepage-006-new-header

        0 points
  • Thibault MaekelberghThibault Maekelbergh, 9 years ago

    There was a thread a while ago about this. Github handles .sketch files as packages; which they basically are.

    Seem to remember there were some issues

    1 point
  • Richard BurtonRichard Burton, 9 years ago

    Even though I just started using it, I highly recommend checking out Pixelapse. The ability to see how a design has progressed over time (as well as the visual diffs) is fantastic. They support Sketch and only upload the deltas between your current iteration and the previous one. I'm really impressed.

    0 points