Photo by visualpanic.

These days the idea of a design team is usually wide open to location. Your creative director could be in LA while the designers work in New York, and the client lives in Texas. To keep in sync and get all the work done on time, I’ve found that I can’t work without certain tools. Here’s a small list of applications and websites that aid collaboration over long distances that and are either free or very affordable.

1. Google Site Apps

Many of you with your own domain may not realize the amazing potential of Google Apps for domain owners. If you run a team or just freelance yourself, you could gain tremendously from setting up a free account. First off, instead of that horrible web mail your host either provides for or charges you for, you could get Gmail and its storage for free. Yes, thats right, and it’s personally branded. There are different options, but if you’re under 100 employees, its straight-up free.

You also get a useful start page (such as start.mydomain.com) that you can use as a login point for clients or employees. Like iGoogle, you have widgets that can be added to the page. Your far left-side is locked for things you want all those logging in to see. For example, a calendar to keep track of deadlines and meetings, or the RSS feed of a production blog. You can even have your inbox on the startup page.

2. iChat

Collaborating on a project couldn’t be simpler than using your webcam. I speak to lots of designers/freelancers and I’m surprised they never use their built in iSights or webcams. It’s amazingly useful to have instead of doing a voice conference. Just open up the app and start a video chat with someone. The wonderful thing is that it doesn’t matter if the user has a windows machine as long as they have an AIM account and a webcam connected. If they have a Mac you can even share your screen and work on the same project (only in Leopard). Saves time, money, and your sanity before you send something out.

3. Gmail

If you still haven’t jumped on the Gmail runaway train, you’re seriously losing out. You can search through everything, filter everything out, label, mark e-mails that have been sent to multiple recipients or are “mass e-mails” and so on. Overall it’s email excellence and you can use Gtalk to immeditely communicate with your colleagues or clients within the your inbox. Everything is stored online, which is the best thing of all because when you need to look up that price you agreed on 3 months ago, it better be at hand.

4. Dropbox

The absolutely most frustrating thing about doing design work sometimes is getting the assets from the client. The FTP is taking too long, FedEx lost the package, it’s 2 gigs and too big to email. Well, at least you can make file transfer simpler and easier with Dropbox. Dropbox allows you to setup a private site that only people you invite can access. There you can share all your files simply by dropping them into a folder on your desktop. It’s easy, secure, and very fast. It’s like “push” document sharing.

5. Harvest

There is Freshbooks as well, but from my experience Harvest is the simplest and easiest to use. With third-party syncing with Basecamp, all your projects and clients can be managed online. You can also track your employee or freelance contractor’s times on the site and send customized invoices directly from the page. Plans start at $14 per month.

6. Basecamp/GoPlan

Managing a project with clients or with a team can be made several times easier by using a web-based app like Basecamp or GoPlan. You log in and just create your project. If you use Harvest as I mentioned before, you can even sync the project together with your account and have Time tracking setup so invoicing won’t be a hassle down the road.

You can setup a calendar feed so you can track your milestones on iCal or other calendar apps, and file storage comes free with GoPlan.

7. Things + iCal

Both do their job independently great, but both together are amazing. You use Things to get your to-do list rundown organized. It syncs with iCal, which you can then beam to all your clients/business partners as either a subscribed calendar or import it into your Google Site Apps calendar (which you can share with everyone as well). Eventually you’ll also be able to sync Things with your iPhone version and iCal already has all the calendars ready to go for both Mac and Windows devices.

Update: Things now syncs wirelessly.

8. Spanning Sync

iCal is great on the desktop, but if you have the Google Site apps and don’t want to waste time recreating events, you need Spanning Sync. Basically you create your events in iCal and then Spanning Sync uploads them to the Google Calendar of your choice. This is great when you want to share milestones with clients or internal schedules with your colleagues.

9. Your phone

Above all, your phone is truly a key to keeping in contact with your clients. If you don’t have a Blackberry, iPhone, or other smartphone-type device…dont worry, you can still do a lot with a basic phone and mobile Internet. What you need is Opera Mobile, and from there you can use all of Google’s online apps anywhere. Keep in sync with your calendars, mail, etc. If you have a more powerful smartphone you can even access remote files on Dropbox or Gmail.

I hope that these 9 mostly free apps online and on the Mac help you keep in sync with your clients and colleagues better. Keeping in sync anywhere is how great freelancers stay organized and stay ahead.

Ricardo Galbis

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