Our Workflow

Recently a few people have been asking us about our workflow and what hardware and software we use, so we have decided to give you an overview of our current workflow from initial enquiry to signing off the project. We have worked hard to test and evaluate our workflows as much as possible to get our projects complete to the highest of standards and to the set deadlines required.

Hardware

I currently run a MacBook Pro 13″, 2.4GHz, 4 GB RAM, running Mac OSX 10.6.3 (snow leopard), Windows XP SP3 & Ubuntu 9.10. Most of our work is done on this machine running Mac OSX and it has become a very reliable machine.

I also have an iPhone 3GS, running iPhone 4.0 Beta 4. This device picks up emails, calls and also works with some of our software (see below).

We also run a Windows machine for testing purposes only, which is an older Dell laptop.

Software

When we first receive a new project, either through email, phone or face to face, we set up the project on our Project Management System, for this we use MarketCircles Daylite. This is a truly amazing program, it handles all of our clients information, project details, tasks and allows us to keep everything together.

Once the project has been given the go ahead, it is exported from Daylite to another MarketCircle product, Billings. This is also a truly amazing product! From here we are able to set up an estimate of the work and tasks to be completed, and then record the actual time we spend on each section of the project.

All of our design and creation work is done on the Adobe suite of applications, we currently have the CS5 Masters Collection installed, which is a brand new release, and we are loving it! We start of with quick prototyping on Fireworks and Photoshop, and then move to the appropriate program from there, Illustrator for printed design and Dreamweaver for online work. Using Photoshop and Fireworks we can create images needed for the site and make the site come alive with Dreamweaver.

During the project the status of the work is kept updated through Billings and Daylite. When we are out of the office, our iPhones run Billings and Daylite apps, which allows us to time offsite work for the invoice and also keep track of anything that needs doing at the time through Daylite.

Throughout the project our work is uploaded to our servers, or if hosted with another company, theirs! All of our design work is now uploaded to our labs and stored in backup online and offline in our office.

When the project is completed and signed off, an invoice is created using Billings and uploaded to our client area of our website. From here on in it is up to the client, when we receive payment the status is updated in Billings and also on our client area and we start the whole process again!

I hope this answered a few questions you have been sending us!

That’s all for now.

J