: Ticketing/Project Management/Collaborative Software for Graphic Design I manage our company's in-house graphic design. We have a lot of requests that are very simple (ie, ad-resizing, simple web

@Berumen635

As mentioned before, a dedicated project management software such as Jira may be overkill and too clumsy for your application. At the same time, a plain helpdesk may just solve one end of your problem (tackle your tickets) but it won't necessarily help out with collaboration or feedback tracking that you'll receive from your clients.

Something that may work for you is Helprace.

Helprace is not only a ticket system for client requests, but also a collaboration and idea tracking tool. Customers or staff can collaborate and share questions/ideas/problem/praise publicly. You can also open as many portals as you like (for different projects) or make them private, so only staff can see them (in other words, staff can collaborate in private).

To be honest, I don't know of other simple project collaboration + helpdesk combos, but most helpdesk providers want to do one thing and do it well, so rather than committing to developing the whole system from scratch, they will offer integrations which is not for everyone.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Courtney577

If you're after something that is very generic, you could do worse than Trello: it's designed for tracking lists of lists, and then moving individual cards/requests between the lists. You have some pretty fine-grained controls for sharing within an organisation as well.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Smith574

Microsoft Sharepoint may be the best simple list-request option, particularly in a Microsoft based corporate environment. I use it daily in my day job, I have a custom list where people can input the request information and I manage the tasks from there.

With Sharepoint you have the ability to make custom views/lists and filter results based on any column (form field you create). You can even do calculated column formulas like "how many days before due date" or "if type = print, assign to Fred, if type = web, assign to Joe..." It is very customizable.

If you want a project management tool for multi-stage projects, as Johannes suggested, Basecamp may be better. It seems however that you are doing a similar thing to what I do (the in house graphics department), which is more "tasks" than "projects". Having used both basecamp and Sharepoint, Sharepoint is a much more appropriate solution for this.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Smith574

There isn't any dedicated graphic design software out there that I've seen and I have looked.

Also, as already stated there is BaseCamp and JIRA. I wouldn't recommend JIRA because it is costly and for enterprise level unless you are looking for an enterprise edition.

Some other suggestions:


SharePoint: very customizable but for an enterprise level.
There is an online edition here.
Filemaker pro does cost but fairly easy to do.


Open source ticket systems:


OSTicket
eticket
helpdesk
OTRS
Request Tracker


This stackoverflow thread may be helpful too. There are some other solutions I will post later from my hosting provider that offer free setups on my shared hosting. Thats another option. If you have a web server see what they offer.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Speyer780

I don't know of any that are design specific. However, I work as a web developer and we also have UI designers who use the same system as all of the developers.

There's quite a few systems out there. The ones I'm most familiar with are Basecamp and JIRA.

JIRA is my personal favorite, I've used it at multiple companies and it is really customizable. It has great tracking abilities, burndown charts, and much much more.

While these type of software are usually geared towards software development there's no reason it can't apply to graphic design. You can attached screenshots to issues/stories and write all details about it as well.

I guess what you need to ask yourself is what you really want from a software, and see if said software meets your requirements -- and if it does, then look no further.

Besides, just because one thing is labeled to be used for thing A, doesn't mean you can't make it work for thing B.

That being said, maybe there is such a "graphic design" software, but I haven't heard of anything yet. Maybe someone else has.

Vote Up Vote Down