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How do Graphic Designers share work they put in the public domain? I'm looking for a site that provides publicly visible, collaborative behavior like Github (which is for source code).

For those not familiar with the behavior of Github, here's an example:

  • You upload a PSD of an image you want to put in the public domain.
  • I can "watch" that image and be notified when you make changes to it.
  • I can submit a "pull" request with changes I've made to your image, and you can decide whether to accept them or not.
  • Anyone can download the PSD and use it (within bounds of the license).
  • Anyone can see the history or progression of the image as changes have been made.

Are there any websites that offer this?

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6 Answers 6

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This answer is obsolete: Pixelapse don't exist anymore

Pixelapse comes pretty close.

Here's what they offer:

  • Public gallery
  • Downloadable source (e.g., PSD, AI, etc.)
  • Revision history
  • Commenting and annotations
  • Dropbox-like saving behavior

Here's what they don't have:

  • Licensing information for public works
  • Explicit "fork" behavior and "pull" requests

Here's a sample I added to try it out: www.pixelapse.com/artworks/92981-store

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  • Looks cool. Is this something you found or something you're a part of? Doesn't particularly matter, just curious...
    – Farray
    Commented Jun 2, 2012 at 0:55
  • Stumbled across them after googling around. I have no affiliation with them nor do I know them.
    – gose
    Commented Jun 2, 2012 at 2:24
  • They're not even exactly what I'm looking for, but as I stated, they come the closest and no one had pointed them out, so I did.
    – gose
    Commented Jun 2, 2012 at 2:30
  • 2
    this answer does not work anymore (Pixelapse has been terminated)
    – JinSnow
    Commented Jun 30, 2017 at 10:04
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In terms of versioning, there aren't great products out there for that. Adobe used to have a product (maybe still does) but nearly all code versioning systems can't deal with tracking changes in binary files. They're really designed for text based documents.

You could use a product such as SharePoint or the like, but even those aren't great given how large PSD files can get.

The best you might come up with is 'asset management software'.

As for sharing work in terms of open sourcing it or public domaining your work, I'm not aware of a central web site for that. It's a good idea, though. There are a variety of places you can use for different types of works.

  • flickr allows you to share photos under a creative commons license
  • other stock photo sites such as http://www.sxc.hu/ let you share photos for free/open source
  • google fonts lets you share fonts you'd like to make open source: http://www.google.com/webfonts
  • People on http://www.deviantart.com/ often share work as public domain or with creative commons licenses.
  • http://dribbble.com/ is a place where designers show work and often will upload a PSD version for others to use.
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    There's also sites like LayerVault and PixelNovel which offer versioning and private collaboration, but not public collaboration.
    – gose
    Commented Jun 1, 2012 at 20:01
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Since GitHub supports PSD file viewing & diffing, there is no reason not to use it for collaborative graphic design.

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  • great but we would need a way to search in a db of pictures. Pictures repos are currently mixt up with code, and even if it wasn't, in the current state you could not look for all bird pictures hsted on Github and chose one to download or edit.
    – JinSnow
    Commented Jun 30, 2017 at 10:18
  • @Guillaume maybe you could try the open source ResourceSpace.
    – niutech
    Commented Jul 3, 2017 at 11:55
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I use DropBox/Google Drive and version changes manually (ie. V1.1, V1.2 etc. for each new/person amend). This is fine for most small projects and you can share folders with teams.

Unfortunately on large file sizes the space gets filled pretty quickly. You can archive older files locally though to handle this.

It's not ideal but as gose said... there really isn't anything yet that I've found does the job.

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  • That's not really the same thing though, the question is about public domain sharing?
    – e100
    Commented Jun 1, 2012 at 10:47
  • Sure, but there isn't a solution for that as far as I'm aware. The other part of my answer was an attempt to offer an alternative bearing in mind the lack of... Having said that Gose has found what, on first glance, seems to be an interesting option.
    – Jules
    Commented Jun 12, 2012 at 11:48
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This topic is really interesting.

I think that we can take inspiration from the coding world on how to manage projects and teams for graphic design: coding reviews, commits, branches.

The main differences between coding and graphing are: tools and outputs. Both have many languages and grammars.

Have you tried GitLab http://gitlab.org for tracking and collaborating on graphic projects? It's like github but downloadable and installable on your serrver. It's about coding but maybe there is some sort of plugin/extension to customize it to the graphic world.

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Behance and DeviantArt don't do most of this? I believe Behance has versioning, and you can set things up so others can download the file.

Also there is versioning and file sharing available with Adobe Creative Cloud. The advantage in Adobe CC is that you can actually view the file before you download it, and you can see individual layers (at least I know you can do that with Illustrator files. I haven't looked at my PSDs there to know if layers are individually viewable)

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