At this time and age, I think designers should learn how use git. It's a tool like anything else.
Specially if your only concern is updating the images, the process should be pretty straightforward, you don't need to learn anything advanced.
Specially if your only concern is updating the images, the process should be pretty straightforward, you don't need to learn anything advanced.
Why don't you learn photoshop and how to do basic design? That way you don't need to ask the designer to do minor tweaks.
It doesn't work. If you've never used version control, "just learn git" can be a multi-week project. If you've never done design, "just learn photoshop" is the same.
Each person is on a team to do a specific job, let them do their jobs.
> Why don't you learn photoshop and how to do basic design? That way you don't need to ask the designer to do minor tweaks.
I know you're trying to be facetious here, but I think it's actually a good idea. Why bother someone else to make a simple fix (I'm thinking typo-correction level here)?
If we programmers are so smart we'll make working "our" way easier, not harder.
If a developer needed to edit images regularly, I would expect them to learn enough Photoshop to do it, not to go bother a designer every time because Photoshop isn't a "developer tool".
For someone who can understand Photoshop layers, understanding commit, push, and pull shouldn't take too long!
We got to the point where he'd own all of the HTML and CSS, as long as I had certain ids and classes to hook my Javascript into. After we got CI and CD going, he's start pushing out new designs several times a day, giving us a pretty quick turn around time.
I never asked him to use the command line, since Tower handled most of the stuff he'd do. I wouldn't ask him to learn all of git, just as how I'd be frustrated if I had to learn all of Photoshop. I wouldn't be opposed to doing some basic work, like changing the color on the background layer.
Most of us have learned to use Photoshop to perform basic tasks without needing to push it all on the designer - things like resizing images, cropping, saving from source PSD to usable formats like JPG, etc.
It's hardly so much to ask of a designer to learn commit, push, and pull.
A designer's job is to design and a programmer's job is to program. Both of those jobs require tools to make their jobs easier.
I'm sick of designers getting away with things programmers never would in their jobs. Programmers learn skills such as: organization (files and directories), communication (comments), workflow management (version control), etc. In my experience with designers, none of them care about things like that. You'll see 5 versions of PSDs filled with Untitled layers and no logical grouping.
These are things that are just expected of programmers and they should be expected of designers as well.
Work with better designers :)
In all seriousness, I think many designers haven't be shown the benefits of why they should change their workflows. If you can demonstrate how using Git would make their jobs easier, you might get some converts.
Also, most designers think visually, so text-based commit history is kind of useless to them. I'd love to see tools like Timeline [http://pixelnovel.com/timeline], but for Git.
As for not naming & grouping layers? That's just a bad designer. Send them this: http://photoshopetiquette.com/
I'm not advocating everyone to be a programmer, but to deliver the best experience, you need to be in control of the design. And I don't say you need to do frontend coding (even I think you should) but just to be part of the workflow, making your work better and everyone's else easier.
I taught my girlfriend to use git/github.com(how to commit, push and pull) in an afternoon, and she's not a coder or a designer. So I think quite easy to learn, specially if you have people around helping you if you get stuck.
It's like saying "I'm a designer, I cannot use email, IRC or Skype", when everyone else around you are using these tools.
Git is just one tool to share work within a team, and it happens to have nice GUI (like SmartGit) which make it almost unnecessary to learn the Git command line. I cannot believe that someone who can use Photoshop is unable to learn to press "Pull", "Commit", and "Pull".
In the end, it's about adopting what is most effective for the entire team to get the job done.