VISUAL CULTURE a tool for design collaboration (with GIT)

Visual Culture is an application to visualise, archive and exchange changes in design projects. Rooted in the vibrant world of free and open source software, Visual Culture will make novel collaboration methods accessible to a public of visual professionals. Working on your existing design files, Visual Culture will let you retrieve previous versions, and share and publish these versions with others.

HARNESS THE POWER OF GIT FOR VISUAL PROJECTS

As a group of designers, we use a software called Git to share files both between us and with the public. This system, originally developed for computer code, tracks the history of computer files, allowing one to go back to retrieve previous versions. These changes can be exchanged amongst users, allowing multiple people to work collaboratively on a project whilst having them keep their own versions and histories. Git has been a crucial part in the success of the collaborative open source culture, being used to develop projects like Linux and Firefox. It is sophisticated and free. Yet the existing interfaces to Git are designed with text files in mind. They can show the history of text-files, but not of images, typefaces and vector drawings.

Visual Culture will be able to visualise the evolution of a design object: this is the evolution of a poster on which OSP worked together.

Visual Culture will allow designers to harness the full power of Git on their own computer in a visual workflow. Visual Culture offers visualisations of the different versions of files, allowing one to understand and explore the history of these digital objects, and to asses the extent of new modifications before one shares them with collaborators. Once one has changed a file, these modifications can be shared with collaborators and with the public at large. Users of Visual Culture will be able to use existing (free) services for sharing and archiving: Gitorious, Github, Gitlab. As different collaborators start to publish, at multiple versions of a file can start to co-exist.

Visual Culture will make it more easy to collaborate on designs and to maintain different ‘forks’, parallel versions, of one project. For more information on the notion of the fork and how it applies in the culture of design, we refer to our article: I like tight pants and no-one starts from scratch: type design and the logic of the fork