Project management for designers can be a tricky business. There’s software designed to help you, but none of them are launched with graphic designers in mind. This post covers project management software for designers, as well as tips on managing your projects better.
A designer with prepossessing branding skills, your graphic designs are usually the face of today’s businesses. However, if you do not keep track of your project management and design tasks using project management software, your designs may fall behind. You will find many useful tips to keep track of your graphic design projects using project management software in this article.
Ziflow
![Ziflow screenshot - 10 Best Creative Agency Project Management Software [2021]](https://obiztools.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/img_61b66abc7b254-500x231.)
Ziflow lets you mark-up creative content/assets and assign change requests using @-tagging and real-time comment logs.
Ziflow is the leader in online proofing and creative project management. You can automate your entire creative content review process for shorter feedback cycles and faster approval times—all with less manual work. Ziflow is currently used by creative project management teams from Showtime, Splash Worldwide, AWS, Hilton, Weber Grills, WeatherTech, Olly, and Everyday Health.
Ziflow boasts over 1,200 file types supported, SOC2 compliance and capabilities like automated workflow, rich comment threads, auto compare, version management, and integrations with leading project management solutions. They have mark-up tools like real-time discussions threads, shapes/arrows, @-mentions, and change management for audits.
Ziflow integrates with Slack, Clarizen, monday.com, Microsoft Teams, JIRA, Dropbox, Trello, Google Drive, and Asana.
Regular Ziflow users report it being a versatile and easy-to-use creative project management solution. It will excel for teams with numerous feedback cycles or rigorous asset/content approval processes. Graphic design teams, editorial teams, creative agency teams, and marketing departments are just a few examples of groups that will benefit from what Ziflow has to offer.
Ziflow costs from $9/user/month (paid annually) and comes with a 14-day free trial.
monday.com
Monday offers a range of tools that creative professionals will benefit from, including monthly and annual expense tracking, a recruitment tracker for HR, easy editorial and blogging planning, competitor analysis, the management of marketing projects, onboarding processes, creative requests and more. Easy, visual and intuitive, Monday is an award-winning PM software used by over 70,000 teams.
In our evaluation criteria, I specify that we are looking for customizable workload management and collaborative feedback, which is something that Monday handles particularly well. Monday allows you to easily collaborate with freelancers and third parties by sharing the same project “boards” and has many options for interface customizability to help navigate the uniques ins and outs of your workload.
Optional integrations include DropBox, Excel, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Integromat, Slack, Trello, Pipedrive, Jira, Mailchimp, and even more through Zapier.
If you are looking for web software that has seamless mobile integration, this may not be it. The tutorial and training options available through the site are also lacking, which leaves users scrounging on the depths of YouTube for unauthorized user-generated content in order to address the steep learning curve.
Monday starts at $17/month for 2 users and has a free 14-day trial.
ClickUp
ClickUp is a creative project management tool software that offers built-in creative features for every step in the design process.
Users can collaborate with their teams on any design project with features for proofing, threaded comments, chat, and easy file sharing. Share files and deliverables with clients and control what they can access with permissions. Collect approval, feedback, or customer information with custom branded forms. ClickUp also offers multiple views and templates for building and managing your creative workflow or getting projects started.
Task management features include task checklists, subtasks, and task templates, as well as the ability to filter, sort, search for, easily reorder, and view tasks in the manner most convenient for the team. Users can also create Gantt charts, calendars, and timelines to visualize tasks.
ClickUp also includes features for creating, sharing, and collaborative editing for documents and files. Users can comment on documents and tasks, assign comments, and chat with other team members for increased communication and collaboration. Reporting features include the ability to create custom dashboards, as well as six built-in report types for team reporting.
ClickUp offers native integrations with Slack, G Suite, Dropbox, and many more tools, as well as over 1,000+ integrations through Zapier.
ClickUp’s free plan is robust and includes all primary features. The unlimited plan starts at $5 a month per user and offers additional functionality.
nTask
nTask is an intuitive project management software ideal for the design team to plan, organize and collaborate on everyday tasks productively. With its Kanban Board feature, users can create their own workflow templates and use them for other projects as well. It helps you monitor the progress and keep track of the work done with the help of Gantt charts.
What It Offers
The workspaces in nTask contain all the information for your work, tasks, and projects. Using this app, the users can create personal and group workspaces to help manage their work. The teams can collaborate on projects and tasks using comments and send replies for sharing feedback. It also helps save and organize documents in folders, which is a necessity for design and creative teams. It can help you see the project progress in real-time with an interactive Gantt chart view having a drag and drop functionality.
Pricing
There are different pricing tiers for nTask including Basic, Premium, Business, and Enterprise. Each plan offers a 14-Day free trial. The Premium plan costs $2.99/month for each user and the Business plan is at $7.99/month per user.
Pros and Cons
Pros
- Easy to use for complex projects
- All in one project management and team collaboration platform
Cons
- No desktop app available now
ProofHub as Project Management Tool
ProofHub is a versatile project management software for designers. It keeps everyone from teams to clients in the loop of the design project-related information.
What It Offers
The inbuilt proofing tool of ProofHub makes it the main attraction for designers. Clients and team members can suggest changes in a design using the markup and annotation tools in ProofHub.
This way team members do not need to fall into the web of email threads to share files and get feedback before the final design is approved.
Apart from this, the elaborate Kanban boards of ProofHub help in a clear understanding of various design tasks, allocations, status updates in no time. Other features of ProofHub relevant to designers include discussions, announcements, chats, Gantt charts, etc.
Timesheets is another important feature that helps in proper tracking of time, creating invoices and analyzing the productivity of design teams.
Pricing
ProofHub offers a free trial. The Ultimate Control plan of ProofHub begins at $89/month billed annually for unlimited users.
Pros and Cons
Pros
- Feature-rich
- Does not charge per user
Cons
- Needs to work on its integrations which they have already announced are in the development process
Conclusion:
A graphic designer is a web designer, who usually works on the back-end of the website. They create graphics for different pages and elements of websites including banners and logos. They have a great role to play in modern-day marketing department. However even with their contribution, they are often left aside when it comes to work distribution and managing tasks. You might wonder how a graphic designer can learn project management skills as they are not supposed to do it.