How do you communicate with developers/clients?

As a software engineer I find the way we communicate with designers is not that great. Designers send us their work either in an email, dropbox, or google docs/drive. I begin my development based on the design, but then the design is usually modified several times. I'm notified via IM or email about the updates, and then I have 3 locations where I have to look for the updated design and try to figure out what the most recent version is.

Does anyone have a similar workflow? Do you use any kind of service to streamline this process? We use trac ticketing system which works well for development but not so good for designers. I looked into basecamp, but that seems to be higher level project management and not very tightly integrated into version control like GIT, or SVN.

 

Drop box is pretty handy. I have hundreds of clients on skype. It helps to keep everyone in one place and in real time.

Nigel

 

Thanks for your reply!
How do you handle file versioning for designs? How do you keep track of changes requested by clients about designs, and then how are those changes communicated to the developer?

 

Usually we have a doc sitting in the drop box folder that gets commented the last time someone does something. There are only 3-4 of us usually on big projects so its not quite as vexing.

I am not entirely sure I have seen everything baked together as you ask here but I have futzed with this. At the time it didn't handle layer comps but its still fairly impressive https://www.pixelapse.com/ which is basically subversion or git for design matters.

There is a good conversation about this here with more alternatives as well
http://graphicdesign.stackexchange....trol-for-designers-alternative-to-version-cue

hope that helps a bit,
Nigel