If you haven’t read my previous post about version control for designers, here is a quick Tl;DR;:

Version control is a system which records and stores every change made to a set of files so that you can go back to a previous state at any time. Developers use it extensively, designers don’t.

And no, Dropbox is not a version control system: you can’t control when a new version should be added or describe what it is about. It is merely a synchronization tool.

Even though I affirmed that “designers can use git”, that wasn’t entirely true. A big piece of the puzzle was missing: allowing the machine to understand how two different sets of changes interact with each other in order to keep both of them.

Until now, if two designers were working on the same file in parallel, there was no way to automatically merge the changes. Someone would need to open both versions and manually choose what was relevant. It was really cumbersome and a big factor in why designers were reluctant to use version control.

In my previous post, I called to tweet the Sketch team to make the sketch files mergeable and they listened (Thank you BC!). Starting with Sketch 43, the file format can be manipulated easily by third parties. That’s a big deal and we are only starting to understand what it will allow us to do.

Meet Kactus

Kactus takes advantage of this new file format and brings you true version control for your design.

It looks at your sketch files and transforms them into a format that git can understand. By doing so, we can close the gap between designers and developers by using a common platform: Github. All the workflows available to developers are now available to designers as well: