Collaboration and version control

The best version control for design is the version control developers have been using for decades. Git, Subversion, and other source control systems are incredibly well tested, robust, and full featured methods of allowing large teams to work on code together.

Why should design be any different?

Taking this approach means some changes to how design projects are typically structured. Pinwheel documents are plaintext XML that is easily diff-able and version control friendly. Pinwheel projects are simply files and folders that can be organised how source code is typically structured. Using Git with Pinwheel also means branches, pull requests and other features can be used. This is how we work on Pinwheel itself.

The industry trend is a shift to proprietary cloud-backed collaboration, making it harder to control your data, and more susceptible to downtime. We don’t like this change. We think there is a better way.

For those who are after a visual way to work with Pinwheel and Git, we recommend GitHub Desktop, Tower, Fork, and Sourcetree.

XML document format #

Pinwheel’s documents are XML-based. They’re pretty sensible and easy to alter in your favourite code editor. If you feel up to it, you can save some Pinwheel documents and have a poke around to see how they’re put together.

Pinwheel’s open source document schema can be found here: Pinwheel document schema