Thursday, March 12, 2.50 pm. Our phones have been on fire throughout the day. A colleague shares the news of a viral text in NYC, apparently the city is going to shut down in a few hours, in a couple of days at the latest. By the weekend, they figure, the “city that never sleeps” will be quarantined.
Monday, March 17, 9.00 am. The city of New York has officially started a complete lockdown. The schools are closed, and so are bars and restaurants, museums, movie theatres, nightclubs, and entertainment venues. Data from other countries about the spread of the coronavirus leave no doubt we all must quickly adapt to new habits. Forced to stay at home, (like Italy), or practicing “social distancing,” our daily routine will forever be changed by COVID-19.
At Picter, we’ve been working remotely since the beginning with our team spread across four time zones – either home office or co-work.
Our customers are marketing and advertising agencies, designers, photo editors, social media gurus, producers, photographers and anyone who needs to invite their colleague or customer to a creative review and collaboration session.
Global health crisis aside, we know a few things about working remotely and the tools critical to creative collaboration. With all the changes in our professional ecosystem – we must continue on – we must continue to collaborate – we must stay focused.
That’s why in this post we’ve compiled a list of essential tools we’re using ourselves as a remote company – that could also help you facilitate your remote work too.
Picter for visual workflow collaboration
Yes that’s right, at Picter we use Picter. We’re continuously working to help the creative community work remotely. All creatives, photographers, designers, filmmakers, can use Picter for visual collaboration.
Our platform allows you to manage, share, discuss and approve all visual assets, such as JPEGs, and GIFS.
But what else can you do with Picter?
Invite your team to a remote workspace – it’s like working in the office but in the cloud
Use Presentation Links instead of in-person meetings
Avoid face-to-face reviews with comments
- Preview your visual content at a glance
- Share links to your visuals with a teammate or client to get instant approvals
- Use annotations for pixel-perfect feedback on your visuals
- Share screenshots
- Collect retouching markup
- Sequence images
- Present images
- Group images into collections
You get the idea. The possibilities are endless. Oh, and it’s not just about images… check out our video support!
In light of the current situation we’re offering 50% off our team plan for up to 6 months. This discount applies automatically when you sign up for a Team Plan.
Try it out for yourself by signing up today!
Slack for team communication
We must admit, our professional lives are much better with Slack. Picter is a fast moving company and a working chat collaboration platform like Slack has made our communications faster and more efficient. With Slack we reduced the amount of emails and we made sure everyone across our offices in the world stayed connected.
Asana for remote project management
For remote planning and project management, Asana proves to be one of the most efficient platforms for us. Not only do they help you orchestrate your daily activity, scheduling and strategic planning, but they also provide some good tips on how to work from anywhere.
Google Meet for meetings
If you’re looking to connect globally with hundreds of people on a video-conference, or you want to transfer your events online, then Hangouts Meet, Google’s video-conferencing tool available to all G Suite users, might be what you need for these days.
Google just announced it began rolling out free access to Hangouts Meet video-conferencing capabilities to all G Suite and G Suite for Education customers globally which includes the possibility of making meetings for up to 250 participants per call, and live streaming for up to 100,000 viewers within a domain accessible to a lot more people.
1Password for security
With all this remote work, access to sites is key and it feels impossible to remember all login details for each account. For this type of problem, you can rely on a password manager such as 1Password.
HelloSign for remote signing of documents
If negotiations and contracts are part of your work activity, you may want to use HelloSign to officially sign all your documents and share them with your preferred partners in real time. It is one of the most reliable and trusted ways to legally sign agreements with a friendly user interface.
Spark for email collaboration
You might be using emails a lot less these days, and though we understand why, emails are still necessary to get organized. At Picter we have been using Spark to prioritize our inbox. It helps us reduce noises from unwanted messages, and allows us to share and comment on specific emails.
Figma for design
If you, like us, operate in the creative industry and essentially work with visuals 24/7, then you may be familiar with a handful of other platforms, such as InVision, Figma, Frame-io.
Figma, our go-to application for design collaboration, allows you to work with design projects without the need to install, save or export files. An incredible help for us when we needed to redesign our website!
While these are challenging times, we hope these tools can help you work remotely as well as they have done for us.
In order to support you wherever we can, we at Picter cut 50% off our prices for the Team Plan for a period of six months (9,99€ instead of 19,99€ per month per team member).
