10 Apps for Working Remotely

Teamwork is about sharing ideas, finding better solutions, and having more productive work. Collaboration tools for designers are essential to improve their work with other team members and clients. The apps listed below will let you share your ideas and designs, so that you can communicate easily with clients or other co-workers.

FileSquare

Impress your clients with prototypes and simple feedback. With FileSquare you can share your work with developers and others designers, show it to clients and collect feedback with clear annotations in real time. This application could also perform usability tests with mobile interactive mockups. FileSquare is a tool for web agencies, software houses, freelance developers and designers.

IdeaScale

IdeaScale is a tool to practice brainstorming even at a distance. Designers should have a lot of good ideas. Why not to try a bit of brainstorming, involving co-workers everywhere? If you are heading for bright, creative ideas, IdeaScale is the perfect application. It can improve the generation of new ideas, comments, opinions. IdeaScale offers a suggestion box software and a platform to share, vote, and discuss feedback.

Marqueed

Share images the easy way with Marqueed. To allow a team to collaborate in the best way it may become necessary to share images. Marqueed does this with a simple drag n’ drop move. There are many other features, all interesting and essential in this kind of applications. However, there is also the possibility to work with external tools, as Google and, maybe, in the next months, Dropbox.

Cage

Keep track of revisions, upload images and videos, archive old projects with Cage. Cage is a very well known application for designers. It’s a collaborative tool that lets designers share their work. You can upload images or videos, create to-do lists, manage and assign tasks, and organize revisions. An interesting tool of Cage allows you to have contextual discussions on a frame or video directly in the timeline. Clients could approve work within the application. And when the project is over, you can archive it.

Draftboard

Draftboard is the collaboration tool made by designers for designers. This is another good application, with a simple interface, that allows easy upload of multiple file types. It makes the process of approving mockups between client and creative people very easy. The app lets people add comments and notes directly to the drafts, share the drafts, and create to-do lists. Draftboard offers a free plan and a free trial on paid plans.

Piktochart

Useful infographics for everybody. It’s likely that you’ll need infographics at some point in time, maybe for a presentations. Piktochart can be useful to design a professional, but quick, infographic. It has a powerful, very good editor and more than 50 design themes. It offers a free trial.

ConceptShare

A lot of tools in a professional app. ConceptShare is very good for sharing files and communicating. It’s a fast tool to collaborate on creative work online. Designers in different places could work together by uploading documents, commenting on them, and receiving feedback. ConceptShare is one of the oldest collaborative apps for creative professionals. Its interface is easy and elegant, while the app contains dozens of features. A free trial is available.

Conceptboard

Conceptboard is a simple white board at your service. Conceptboard looks a bit like Scribblar, but it is a bigger, more professional application. It offers the typical collaboration tools, as the possibility to draw freehand, to upload a document, image or other file, to edit them, to share ideas and files and to collaborate. Another good point of Conceptboard is the user-friendly interface.

Canvasdropr

Canvasdropr is the application that make navigating easy. Images, photos, MS Office documents get uploaded fast with Canvasdrop. The name of the app tells how it works: you “drop” on the “canvas”, as it were a blank sheet of paper ready to be filled. The interface is very simple and friendly to navigate. As in Marqueed, you can use external tools, as Google Drive, Instagram, Flickr, etc.

Cozimo

Cozimo is an elegant and friendly app for team work. Do you want to add notes to videos? Cozimo is the perfect application. Obviously, it is also possible to add notes to images and organize virtual interactive meetings in which team review projects. Another feature of this elegant and friendly app is the chance to specify the role of each member of the team and make files accessible accordingly.

About the Author:

Vanessa Li is young blogger that loves to write about business and designs. She is now working for a software company called Oursky. Find her on Twitter: @vanessa_oursky.