CreativityMarketingProductivity

A fresh look for Hightail.com

You might have noticed that we have a new look over at Hightail.com. What’s your first impression?

If you said that it’s clean and to the point (like the overwhelming feedback we received internally), then we’ve stayed true to the original brief that was drafted and agreed upon for this project. Given the importance of the creative project brief and how often good intentions morph into something else, I’d like to take a moment to thank boutique creative agency Rip!Roar, who partnered with us to produce the new Hightail.com designs.

Marketers, agencies and creatives know the drill. The creative process is fraught with time-sensitive yet time-sucking tasks. If you’re a creative, you might underestimate the amount of time it actually takes to review creative work. If you’re a reviewer, your suggestions might be unwelcome and might not make design sense tied to the big picture. There’s a delicate balance that needs to be made to maintain a strong relationship throughout the exhaustive creative production process. Having a tool to ease the pain during creative reviews certainly helps. As our partner in building the new Hightail.com, Seth Gordon from Rip!Roar stated it well: “Finding an adequate and excellent platform to review web development like this is something that I think is really grossly needed and underrepresented.”

The little things really add up

Beyond sticking to the brief, we used Hightail to facilitate the collaboration on content and creative reviews for our own website designs (no brainer). And while the Hightail marketing team is working in the application daily for our multimedia projects, this particular project was on a much larger scale with 15 collaborators, 219 files (including documents, images, animations, videos and HTML) and 690 comments.

As the main stakeholder in reviewing and approving the site content, I can’t imagine hosting a creative review without Hightail. And I’m not talking about the fun stuff, such as the big reveal or initial concepting. I’m talking about the nitty-gritty type of review: Does this load correctly? Is the copy right? Do the designs meet spec? Is there a comma missing? Why was this changed? Giving this level of feedback takes a lot of time and attention to detail. So when you are able to find shortcuts, you celebrate the little things.

Just in time for the third (and final) design and content review of our website, Hightail released the ability to preview HTML files in the application by simply adding the webpage URL to your Space. Prior to being able to add and preview HTML files in Hightail, my process looked like this:

  1. View pre-production URL in browser.
  2. Take a full-page screenshot using a browser extension – and don’t forget to stop scrolling while the screenshot is being taken.
  3. Save the file to your computer.
  4. Upload the file to our Hightail Space.
  5. Mark up the file previews and leave my feedback.

The new release of HTML file previews, though a seemingly small feature, cut the number of steps required in order for me to review creative in half for each of the pages that I was reviewing, and I’m grateful for every minute that I saved.

To learn more about how HTML previews work in Hightail, check out our post: Creative reviews for digital media just got easier with HTML previews.

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