• Overview
• Requirements
• Supported files
• Limitations
• The Design Management page
• Adding designs
  • Skipped designs
• Viewing designs
  • Exploring designs by zooming
• Deleting designs
• Starting discussions on designs

Design Management

Overview

Design Management allows you to upload design assets (wireframes, mockups, etc.) to GitLab issues and keep them stored in one single place, accessed by the Design Management’s page within an issue, giving product designers, product managers, and engineers a way to collaborate on designs over one single source of truth.

You can easily share mock-ups of designs with your team, or visual regressions can be easily viewed and addressed.

For an overview, see the video Design Management (GitLab 12.2).

Requirements

Design Management requires Large File Storage (LFS) to be enabled:

• For GitLab.com, LFS is already enabled.
• For self-managed instances, a GitLab administrator must have enabled LFS globally.
• For both GitLab.com and self-managed instances: LFS must be enabled for the project itself. If enabled globally, LFS will be enabled by default to all projects. To enable LFS on the project level, navigate to your project’s Settings > General, expand Visibility, project features, permissions and enable Git Large File Storage.

Design Management requires that projects are using hashed storage (the default storage type since v10.0).

If the requirements are not met, the Designs tab displays a message to the user.

Supported files

Files uploaded must have a file extension of either png, jpg, jpeg, gif, bmp, tiff or ico.

Support for SVG files and PDFs is planned for a future release.

Limitations

• Design uploads are limited to 10 files at a time.
• Design Management data isn’t deleted when a project is destroyed yet.
• Design Management data won’t be moved when an issue is moved, nor deleted when an issue is deleted.
• From GitLab 12.7, Design Management data can be replicated by Geo but not verified.
• Only the latest version of the designs can be deleted.
• Deleted designs cannot be recovered but you can see them on previous designs versions.

The Design Management page

Navigate to the Design Management page from any issue by clicking the Designs tab:

Adding designs

To upload design images, click the Upload Designs button and select images to upload.

Introduced in GitLab Premium 12.9, you can drag and drop designs onto the dedicated dropzone to upload them.

Designs with the same filename as an existing uploaded design will create a new version of the design, and will replace the previous version. Introduced in GitLab Premium 12.9, dropping a design on an existing uploaded design will also create a new version, provided the filenames are the same.

Designs cannot be added if the issue has been moved, or its discussion is locked.

Skipped designs

Designs with the same filename as an existing uploaded design and whose content has not changed will be skipped. This means that no new version of the design will be created. When designs are skipped, you will be made aware via a warning message on the Issue.

Viewing designs

Images on the Design Management page can be enlarged by clicking on them. You can navigate through designs by clicking on the navigation buttons on the top-right corner or with Left/Right keyboard buttons.

The number of discussions on a design — if any — is listed to the right of the design filename. Clicking on this number enlarges the design just like clicking anywhere else on the design. When a design is added or modified, an icon is displayed on the item to help summarize changes between versions.

Indicator	Example
Discussions
Modified (in the selected version)
Added (in the selected version)

Exploring designs by zooming

Designs can be explored in greater detail by zooming in and out of the image. Control the amount of zoom with the + and - buttons at the bottom of the image. While zoomed, you can still start new discussions on the image, and see any existing ones.

Deleting designs

There are two ways to delete designs: manually delete them individually, or select a few of them to delete at once, as shown below.

To delete a single design, click it to view it enlarged, then click the trash icon on the top right corner and confirm the deletion by clicking the Delete button on the modal window:

To delete multiple designs at once, on the design’s list view, first select the designs you want to delete:

Once selected, click the Delete selected button to confirm the deletion:

Note: Only the latest version of the designs can be deleted. Deleted designs are not permanently lost; they can be viewed by browsing previous versions.

Starting discussions on designs

When a design is uploaded, you can start a discussion by clicking on the image on the exact location you would like the discussion to be focused on. A pin is added to the image, identifying the discussion’s location.

Introduced in GitLab Premium 12.8, you can adjust a pin’s position by dragging it around the image. This is useful for when your design layout has changed between revisions, or if you need to move an existing pin to add a new one in its place.

Different discussions have different pin numbers:

From GitLab 12.5 on, new discussions will be outputted to the issue activity, so that everyone involved can participate in the discussion.