Improving The GitLab Visual Management Experience
After talking at length with @sarrahvesselov, @tauriedavis, and @dimitrieh, we have given a lot of thought to how visual assets are managed. At the moment it is poor. The way discussion happens around designs is designs are pasted in markdown and loaded into comments. This is not how a good design process works in real life. You lose a lot of data this way.
What designers and everyone needs is proper revisions of designs, which we already have! What designers need is proper discussion around their designs. We already have all the parts to make this happen, here is what we posit.
Each issue also gets an asset (or design, or artwork) library, which I originally proposed here https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/19562 10 months ago
- Add assets to the issue.
- Assets would be links to repo files. Could be a design in a different repo. That way there are revisions and we can track them.
- Assets could also be static images which we already store but there would not be revisions for those.
- Display library of assets in the issue:
- Clicking the thumbnail opens a modal which shows comments about that revision of the design.
- If it is a git asset we can click through previous or future revisions and see their comments.
- Comments exist as regular comments in the issue. So a comment added to an asset also appears in the comments in the discussion below. With a special avatar.
When people want to talk about a specific design they can link to it instead of pasting images. This link will bring up the thumbnail in the modal along with associated comments.
We already have comments on diffs and comments in an issue. This would act as a normal comment in the issue but also just have an association with an asset. This way we can query for comments on a specific asset.
This is not just a benefit for designer. Think about people who are designing for aerospace, blueprints, cad files. Whatever it is. Anything that is visual needs to have a better flow instead of copy and pasting into an issue. That copy and paste should be a living revision. Something that exists as a reference to an asset.
Comments that are added can be added to a specific x and y coordinate of a picture.
This would also be great to take advantage of all the file viewers I have been creating. This way we can view a Sketch file or a 3D file. Even zip files.