Easy Design Collaboration | Trunk Review

What is Trunk?

Trunk is a lightweight yet powerful platform for designers built to enable collaboration and efficient management of design files through secure version control.  Trunk brings hands-off approach in the design workflow thanks to its features that allows users to enjoy harmonious resolution of conflicts, branching and pull requests, reverting file history, and monitoring of changes in design files among other things. The secret behind Trunk’s revolutionary-like performance is the ability to let designers focus on creating great designs without getting overwhelmed with Git concepts. Although one can work on a project alone, Trunk simplifies design collaboration for teams by unifying the entire process while still maintaining a smooth user experience.

Features

Design collaboration

Trunk brings a fresh and better way to collaborate on projects by simplifying and harmonizing different aspects that contribute to the whole design process. With Trunk you can forget about any confusion because with the power of automatic version control users can enjoy unparalleled efficiency in managing design files without hampering normal workflow. For instance, since multiple files can be tagged under one project it helps keep things neat for the entire team. And when it comes to making changes the platform makes it even easier to get everything going.

It eliminates any possibility of mix up by keeping track of specific changes, who made a change, and why. A team member affecting an alteration in the files can leave comments explaining his/her actions to the rest of the team.  Ideally, while in the process of making changes one can keep them private until they finish then they can merge them to the master branch for all to see. Essentially, it provides a convenient way for teams to work together for it not only provides an easy way to create projects but it also makes it super simple to invite others to a project, gather real-time feedback and adopt recommendations from others.

Sketch and Photoshop files support

The platform is compatible with Photoshop and Sketch hence you only need to have it active on the background to work on Sketch and Photoshop files. This makes it near effortless for designers to securely work across the file versions. For instance, one could easily have a project in Trunk utilize a UI design from Sketch and images adapted from Photoshop. Trunk also comes with a large file optimization feature hence there is no restriction on file upload sizes. This allows increased flexibility when syncing files while still providing for quick downloads.

Easily handle merge conflicts

Trunk provides for handling of conflicting changes in a consistent and rational way. In the event that two team members implement specific changes to a file, Trunk comes in helping to merge the two in a systematic and less chaotic manner. Besides every time there is an incident of conflicting changes, there is a visual notification that alerts users to fix the issue. At that point, one can revert back or merge the conflict in line with their needs.

Revert file history

The rollback feature gives control over design files versions regardless of the changes that are implemented in the process.  Trunk keeps track of changes made on versions such that at every point users can view the full record of alterations on design files. This makes it possible to compare current and previous versions and if there is a need to get an earlier version back then it takes only a few clicks.

Storage

All design files in Trunk are highly secured and stored. Users benefit from 256-bit TLS encryption and daily backups on Trunk cloud whether they are on the free or paid plan. So you won’t have to worry about losing track of your files and data.

Pros: 

• Offers multiple file format support
• Brings order to design collaboration through a non-destructive resolution of conflicting file changes
• Provides a better framework for working on team projects
• Has intuitive interface

Cons: 

• Trunk is Mac only

Pricing

The tool can be accessed via the following packages

Free plan

• Costs $0
• Allows creation of unlimited public project
• Permits one free private project
• Offers up to 10GB of free storage plan

Pro Plan

• Costs $12 per month
• Has all the features in free plus
• Unlimited private projects
• Offers up to 250 GB storage space
• Share and collaborate

You can sign up and start a free trial for 30 days after which you can continue by paying up or get back to free version.

Teams

• Available at $15 per user per month
• Come with everything in Pro plus
• Slack integration
• No storage limit
• Priority support