Wake Wants You To Share Designs As They Happen

After weeks of hiding in plain site, Wake.io launches today as a timeline and sharing tool aimed at designers. Think Pinterest for designers, but private and secure.

“Designers just typically have very unique needs,” says Chris Kalani, Wake’s CEO. “Nothing has really fulfilled the need for visual storytelling in a secure, private space that integrates into your design tools. Basically, everything right now—Slack included—is designed for text. I guess the other visual tools that exist, like Pinterest for example, is obviously not a place that someone like Uber or Twitter is going to be sharing sensitive work on.”

Wake is dumb-easy to use. A desktop app does screenshots, which are sent seamlessly to your team’s Wake board. Popular design tools like Sketch have an integration, as well. Other team members can check their team’s Wake board to see updates or leave comments. There’s a now-ubiquitous Slack plugin that will blast your work-in-progress to chatting comrades. And for everything else—say, a whiteboard or a napkin?—there’s an iOS app.

“Every tool that’s come before has been in this inspiration/sharing space, and we’re very focused on . . . getting designers out of this ‘perfectionism’ mindset, to start sharing ideas that normally their coworkers and other designers they work with, or developers, wouldn’t see,” says Kalani, who had previously been a designer at Facebook and is no stranger to the fast-casual design lifestyle. “We wanted to find a way to capture the things in-between all the design reviews.”

Wake is open to everyone today, is free for a month, and then costs $12 per user, per month. Not cheap, depending on your team size, but particularly useful for design shops spread across the globe.