Five years ago, Min Ming and I had this notion that designers didn’t have access to the same types of structured collaboration tools that programmers had built for themselves with CVS, SVN and later git.

Min Ming had worked as a designer at Google where he found that assets were internally organized in a single massive shared folder. Finding the latest version of a file was nearly impossible with weird naming conventions like “app_icon_version_2_final_final_final.psd”. As a developer on the receiving end, I had experienced the harrowing, manual process of having to export each individual asset from a Photoshop file at various sizes just to be able to commit it to our code repo. The designer ↔ developer collaboration experience simply felt broken and it was insane to us that no one had tackled this problem before.

With our own experience in mind, we set out to create a platform for designers to organize, iterate and collect feedback on their work together. Fast forward three years, we introduced a new way for designers to work together and made a small dent in promoting the idea of open-source design. In early 2015, we joined the Dropbox family to further our vision of bringing an open collaboration platform to a broader audience beyond design.

As part of Dropbox, we have continued to invest in our vision of building out a compelling suite of productivity features that dramatically improve the design collaboration experience. With support for Adobe Creative Suite files including .psd, .ai and .eps, rich version history support across moves, renames and file edits and the ability to annotate images and documents with comments, we believe that the core Dropbox product offers a strong alternative to Pixelapse.

Today, we are shutting down Pixelapse as a standalone product but its story does not end here. The original vision we had for the company will continue to be served by Dropbox with a far reaching impact on millions of users.

Keep designing!

Shravan, Min Ming and Michael