Every creative pro has some "final_v2_client_approved_remastered" file sitting somewhere on their...

Every creative pro has some "final_v2_client_approved_remastered" file sitting somewhere on their...Every creative pro has some "final_v2_client_approved_remastered" file sitting somewhere on their...

The network for creativity

Join 1.25M professional creatives like you

Connect with clients, get discovered, and run your business 100% commission-free

Creatives on Contra have earned over $150M and we are just getting started

Back to feedPost

Taiwo Folu

• Sep 1

Every creative pro has some "final_v2_client_approved_remastered" file sitting somewhere on their machine. We've been building Clustta for about three years now to make that file (and the ten versions before it) a thing of the past.

The goal was simple: build an artist-friendly collaboration, version control, and asset management tool we love, and one we hope you'll love too.

Most of the challenge was in blurring the lines between technical version control platforms like GitHub and everyday file-sharing apps like Google Drive, so it feels both fresh and familiar to users coming from either camp. That meant constantly figuring out what features to add, where they belonged in the UI, and so on.

Clustta is open source, is available for general use now, and still very much in active development, so I'll be sharing updates here as we keep building 🤞

More updates and case studies coming soon.

Figma UI Design Product Design Software Development Go JavaScript

Saad Zaman

• Sep 1

The real problem here is diffing and storage for binary assets, a 200MB PSD that changed one layer shouldn't cost 200MB every save. Content-defined chunking gets you most of the way. Merge is the other wall, two artists on one file with no text to three-way merge means you're building lock or branch-and-review, not git.

Taiwo Folu

• Sep 1

Yes - Clustta uses content-defined chunking so storage and bandwidth are more efficiently managed. That 200MB file will probably use just ~30MB additional storage when a new version is created. With respect to merge, there's a built-in soft lock - only one user can create a checkpoint/version when assigned the file explicitly.

Saad Zaman

• Sep 1

Soft lock plus explicit assignment is the pragmatic call, it matches how creative teams already pass files around. And ~30MB on a 200MB change is the number that sells it, that's the part most "git for designers" pitches hand-wave.