April Highlights: Rich notes, streamlined notifications, web improvements & optimized assets

Calvina Cheng

Apr 2021@calvina

Welcome to the April edition of Zeplin Highlights, where we’re rounding up new and noteworthy product news from the past month. Read on to learn about new features that make design handoff a smoother process, plus other improvements to notes, notifications and Zeplin’s web app experience.

Rich notes & streamlined Notifications

What’s your go-to way of communicating with the rest of the team? Some folks might prefer to link to background documentation, write up short descriptions, or even insert diagrams and infographics. You can now do all of the above within Zeplin’s notes.

Whether you want to jot down some inspiration for yourself or pass on notes to a product manager, you can now attach images to notes.

For example, let’s say your designer wants to have older design patterns easily on-hand while iterating on wireframes. Simply add any relevant attachments like images, GIFs or other visuals you’d like to use to a note in the new design.

These richer notes capabilities allow you to add visual elements to your communication, providing helpful context to your comments. As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words (which is a lot to type up anyway).

After getting lots of insightful feedback from our users, we’re also streamlining the Notifications experience in Zeplin.

With remote work still going strong, staying on top of relevant notifications is key. With Smart Filter, you can now filter your note-related notifications according to types of notes, note colors, members and dashboard sections. You can easily filter through your notes by using the filter text field or using the dropdown filter buttons.

Another way we’re making it easier to stay on top of your notifications is by adding the ability to mute projects and styleguides in Zeplin. With so many different roles like designer, QA engineer, product manager and others, we’ve found that there are situations in which a user is not actively involved in a project anymore. With the ability to mute notifications from projects and styleguides, users can cut down on the noise.

Finally, we also freshened up the Notifications panel and notification cards — nothing like spring cleaning. 🌸

Powering up the Zeplin web app

We also rolled out several performance improvements in the Zeplin web app’s workspace to help keep teams of all sizes in flow. No matter how many projects you have, you won’t have to worry about slow loading or interactivity issues in your workspace. We’ll be introducing similar enhancements to the project dashboard and Zeplin’s overall Mac app performance in the coming weeks, so be on the lookout!

Let Zeplin optimize that for you

We know that after designers hand off design assets to developers, they often spend time optimizing those design assets. While Zeplin already provided some optimized formats like SVG, we’re adding more formats including JPG and PNG. We’ll also be adding support for WebP assets soon so that developers can save some time and know that the assets in Zeplin are ready to use. You’ll be able to take advantage of these optimized assets next week.

We hope these new capabilities and features help you and your team build more amazing products and deliver on the promise of design.

As always, please drop us a line if you have any questions or feedback!