Sharing assets to build upon

Story: As a designer I want to share my files so that others can build upon my work. (Or more specifically: I made a poster in Scribus which I want to share with others, but how shall I provide that file and its graphics?)

Problem: For images there are OK sharing platforms, but for other formats, in particular program specific ones, like Libreoffice files or Scribus files, there are none.

Possible solutions:

  • Check them in to git/github (that feels icky to me, git does well with plain text, afaic it does not do well with binaries)
  • Use nextcloud/dropbox/younameit (use is, but there is no public instance/platform to share on and not every project can/wants to administrate their own nextcloud)
  • …

What do you do?

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For the GNOME Foundation Annual Reports, we collaborated through a git repo. Automatically synced with Sparkleshare.
It’s pretty much a folder with all the images, fonts, sla-files etc.

We also have a Nextcloud instance on cloud.gnome.org, that we use more of an archive.
A place to put screenshots of different releases, outreach/engagement material etc.

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At Snowdrift.coop we started using a Seafile instance which a team member set up on her private server.

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@jdittrich please, what’s your preferred OS? Might the sharing include concurrent edition of any file by multiple users?

tl;dr there are good reasons for those questions, I’ll not try to squeeze the technical details into this space.

ownCloud, Nextcloud

Consider:

Before joining Open Source Design I tested two public instances:

Of the two, Unixcorn serves me better. Maybe because:

Nos serveurs sont hébergés à Paris, en France.

YMMV.

Compatibility

The current draft of my profile mentions work in progress.

Provider listings

Around the time of testing I reported, to Nextcloud, that some of its provider listings were outdated (indicating free service, where the provider offered no such service).

IPFS

IPFS is the Distributed Web

I began loosely following progress in 2015 but (sorry) my understanding of the technology is so limited that I can’t tell whether it might suit your use case.

Side note: https://twitter.com/grahamperrin/status/862121100595138560 – Uncensorable Wikipedia on IPFS (freedom of access to data is probably off-topic … take it to the lounge, if you like).

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At Nextcloud we have all the source files in the relevant source repositories. That works well since that’s mostly SVGs for icons.

For mockups, we post the images themselves in the issue discussions, for example like in the spec for the Contacts menu. Of course the mockups always need explanatory text so that’s what the issues are great for.
Ideally people include a link to the source, for example hosted on their own Nextcloud. This is however not regulated. Usually modifications are done by either asking for the source, or modifying the image, or by just giving text feedback and discusing.

We also used to have a design repository with mockups and sources etc but it wasn’t really used and introduced an additional thing you needed to do for designers to get involved. Git and repositories are complicated enough. :wink: So we abandoned that concept. It also lacked the text context and discussion on the design we can have in the issues directly, and separated the design process too much.


Now for specific promotional material, and source files for logo, colors, print files, presentations, etc we have a specific promo repository. That works very well to have one public central place for all these materials.