How Creativedash uses Boards

We’re Creativedash, a team of designers and developers working out of our studio in Roseville, CA. We’re focused intently on creating emotional connections between users and products through beautiful and intuitive experiences. We’re a small, close-knit team with more than a century of combined experience in nearly all aspects of product, from design to development.

Internally, we operate as a sort of hybrid design agency/agile software team, blurring the lines of each model. Alongside our many client partnerships with talented folks in the tech world, we’ve developed a few of our own products including UI8.net and Robot.co (launching soon).

“With Boards, we’re all on the same page.”

Our team uses InVision to simplify and empower a variety of tasks, so we were excited when the new Boards feature was released. We continue to experiment with it, finding new use cases around every corner. That’s the best thing about Boards: its inherent flexibility is powerful.

Boards has empowered us to create some neat output that we’re always proud to share with our clients. Check out a few examples below.

Brand guidelines

Boards are rock-solid when it comes to the “bread and butter” use case of a visual branding board.

Before Boards, each of our designers had their own preference and method for sharing this type of visual branding exploration. This led to some kinks in our collaborative process and difficulty in sharing the output amongst the larger team. With Boards, we’re all on the same page and have a familiar tool with which to provide one another feedback.

“The best thing about Boards: its inherent flexibility is powerful.”

The release of Boards actually coincided just as we’d been refining and tweaking our own agency brand internally. As the digital landscape continually evolves, we’re always exploring small changes that can positively impact our messaging and the Creativedash brand.

Here we used Boards to organize and display a variety of Creativedash brand updates internally. This led to some really powerful conversations amongst the team and ultimately strengthened the project and design directions. There’s nothing like seeing all of this stuff in one organized place. It’s also beautiful by default, so our team can focus on the content, letting the visual presentation take care of itself.

Project X presentation

Boards was a huge help in handing off this final project to a recent client of ours in the financial field. Outside of endless PDFs and scattered static images on Slack, Basecamp, and email threads, a holistic view of larger completed projects is tough to achieve.

We were able to bring all aspects of the collaboration together in one place in a way that would have required significant custom design and development efforts otherwise.

This client responded well to the presentation via Boards, as we expected, and will soon return for some additional project scope. We really appreciate tools like this that are developed with the design-centric mindset and cater to our needs, resulting in saved time.

Thunder UI Kit

This Board represents an internal product that we created for UI8.net, our ecommerce marketplace for design resources. Boards allowed the design team to organize a holistic view of the deliverable in one place.

By building the Board up first, we were then able to successfully collaborate between multiple designers in getting this UI kit designed across Sketch and Photoshop concurrently. Something we struggled with in the past became a strength by using Boards.

Material UI Kit

For the Material UI Kit, we followed a similar workflow to the Thunder UI Kit internally. It’s become a part of our UI kit design workflow to develop and maintain a few boards from concept through to the final product(s).

Material UI Kit was especially fun to present in the Boards format because of its lively colors and extensive UI examples. The design details section allowed us to illustrate the extensive range of interface elements included in the kit.