Half of the year is over, and if you’re anything like us, you may have gotten a little loose with the goals you set for yourself at the beginning of the year. We like to check in with our annual goals around this time and rearrange our expectations or set ourselves back on track. Dropmark is a super tool for creating, reviewing, celebrating, and planning your next steps with a vision board.

What is a vision board?
A vision board is a way to brainstorm and visualize a fresh perspective or inspiration for something you hope to work for in the future. Some positive long-term changes that come with creating a vision board and keeping it visible include increasing positive thinking, solidifying goals/dreams, and increasing proactive behavior.

While vision boards create positive feedback loops and encourage you to achieve your best self, they are not just a way to manifest. It’s essential to realize that while this is an excellent tool for envisioning what you want, you must actively work on it! Keeping up with your goals can be challenging, but Dropmark makes it easy to organize your thoughts.

How to make a vision board
Start with a theme for your board, whether that is a goal you’d like to achieve. Then, start gathering anything and everything that inspires you to reach those goals. With Dropmark, you can collect images, text from inspirational messages, videos, songs, and more to keep your eyes on the prize.

Vision boards are similar to mood boards we create for client projects, where we create a specific look and feel for future products. You can use vision boards on Dropmark within a team to achieve company goals or visions.

How to use Dropmark as a vision board
For personal growth or team goals, start saving items to a collection and add a description stating the objective.

Do you have multiple goals that fit within the same theme? Create stacks within a collection to keep track of them.

Whenever you reach a milestone or wish to check in, leave comments to remind yourself how far you’ve come.

Remember to add videos or music that align with your goals or can boost your mood and add to the positive vibes!

We made a Dropmark vision board to remind us to get outdoors on the bike more; check it out!

Truthfully, design systems are frequently unrecognized for their hard work and dedication. Their job isn’t cool (or sexy), yet they are an absolute workhorse. The building blocks in a design system help create a shared language for teams and ensure a consistent experience for the user.

Without design systems, no matter the scale, there would be a lot of uncertainty in the design process. This could mean that even the most straightforward problems for your team may go awry. The standards created by design systems allow teams to work more efficiently and process the complex issues of designing a digital product in a streamlined manner.

The number of ways one might customize a design system is seemingly endless. The depth and breadth of granularity for a large corporate team might not be right for a small and mighty team of five. What they do have in common is that they will all contain some collection of the following (non-exhaustive) list: technical specs, design tokens, templates, layouts, color palettes, iconography…the list goes on.

To gather inspo for our own design system, we started a collection of cool and intelligent design systems we’ve seen recently. Check it out on Dropmark and let us know if you have any that we should add!

With all the organizational tools available these days, your manifestation of a new feature or product can become a bit of a yak shave and distract you from what matters most: the final product! Because it is a relatively new field and every team has different requirements to measure success, there are no hard and fast rules for product management. We’ll take you through one version of the process on Dropmark to show how you can keep all your collaboration in one place and stop wasting time logging in to countless services or searching through endless threads.

Idea management and organization
You’re on a team of stellar creatives and stakeholders, and everyone has an idea for a new product or update at every turn. Creating a collection of text items for new ideas or data gathered from customer interviews is an excellent place to start a silo for potential products. Add tags to distinguish between those you’d like to follow up with more quickly than others.

Product briefs
Once you’ve settled on an order of operations for which ideas to tackle in what order, create a stack inside of a new collection named for your project. Inside, you can create text items to answer the big questions that come next, such as: what are we building and why, what should our achievements look like at the end, and how are we going to measure the success of our new product? Text items inside a stack can be the central hub for these questions. Collaborators and stakeholders can add comments so everyone stays organized and on the same page. Create unique thumbnails for easy visual separation between each conversation point.

Roadmapping
Once you’ve settled the initial question of what you’re building and who the stakeholders are, creating a road map will help guide the project. It should serve as the project’s vision and strategy to keep internal stakeholders aligned and tasks on track. Road maps for projects are living and breathing documentation that will evolve and change over the lifespan of your product. Thankfully, using Dropmark to roadmap is flexible; you can comment, edit, and annotate items to keep them current or archive what is no longer serving your project.

Prioritization
Using a framework for your project to take your product from dream to reality is crucial to creating a successful feature or product. Whatever framework works best for your team, you can keep track of the progress on Dropmark.

In this example, we are using a product tree to prioritize. If you complete a product tree IRL, you can upload a photo to your project’s Dropmark collection to reference in the future. You can make quick edits with annotations, which is a great way to adjust expectations.

If you prefer to keep everything online, upload a blank digital product tree to your collection and invite stakeholders and team members to comment or annotate what should go in the trunk, branches, and leaves.

Follow up
With the ideation and planning stages set, you’re ready to start building and shipping. A lot of times, a product manager will serve as more of an advisory role during this stage. Your work will likely focus more on making sure that what is being built is still clearly defined and will achieve the intended goals of the project. During the delivery phase, your team can use stacks as a kanban board and add tags for further organization. You can move items between the stacks to track progress. After deployment, you can transition your collection into data collection to keep track of customer input, and make adjustments as necessary to keep your product in shape.

Building a website is a big task and can require much time, money, and resources that might need to be made available or necessary. For you or your team, sometimes, a more minimal approach to your digital presence may be all you need, especially if you are trying to share customized content with your audience or promote a particular type of information.

✨ Enter the microsite ✨

Microsites typically consist of a single web page or a few pages much smaller than a complete website and contain specific or niche information. A company may use a microsite to distinguish between its main website and a specific message or product. On an individual level, one might make a microsite as a reference to silo a particular type of information for themselves or even create a small portfolio to share with potential clients or employers.

With Dropmark, you can use a custom domain and customize your layout and thumbnails to treat your collections as microsites! The possibilities are vast, but here are a few of the ways we’ve enjoyed microsites on Dropmark:

Project showcase or portfolio: One advantage of building a portfolio on Dropmark is the ability to focus on your content. Your work will be the center of attention, with no distracting UI fluff or ads. Bonus: if you’re on a Solo plan, you can create stacks and build simple case studies within them.

Thematic resources: Do you have a penchant for collecting hyperspecific internet things like 404 pages or microgaming? Create a Dropmark collection for each topic, gathering articles, videos, images, and links related to that theme. Use Dropmark’s built-in sharing features to turn these collections into accessible microsites.

Video hub: when you upload video content to a collection and enter presentation mode, the videos will autoplay, creating a dynamic, engaging experience akin to a tiny TV channel. It’s a great way to upload regular content as a content hub.

Newsletters: Dropmark collections are a great way to upload regular content. If you’re working on a newsletter, your collection can be a stellar way to organize and host your research. Add a custom domain to a solo or team plan and turn your collection into a newsletter issue you can share directly with your readers.

We hope you’ve been inspired to get started on your own microsites, and we hope you send us what you come up with! ❇️

When you’re trying to wrangle a project into shape, effective collaboration is the cornerstone of success. Whether you’re working on a small design project or a large-scale marketing campaign, clear communication and organization are vital to creating a stunning final product.

Stacks
Group related items effortlessly, streamlining your workflow and making navigation a breeze. Think of them as virtual folders where you can group together files, links, images, and more. Stacks provide a hierarchical structure that helps organize your project assets in a logical manner. Whether you’re managing projects, documents, or ideas, Stacks are your key to a tidy and efficient workspace.

Tags
A simple yet powerful way to categorize and locate items with a quick search. Add relevant tags to your notes, files, or projects, and easily retrieve important information when you need it most. You can also assign descriptive tags to items within your stacks. They serve as metadata, making it easier to categorize and search for specific content. With tags, you can assign keywords or labels to items, allowing for flexible organization and retrieval.

How to leverage stacks and tags together to enhance client collaboration on projects

• Organize Assets with Stacks: Start by creating stacks for different aspects of your project, such as “Design Concepts,” “Client Feedback,” “Resources,” and “Final Deliverables.” Each stack serves as a container for related items, providing a clear structure for your project assets.

• Use Tags for Granular Organization: Within each stack, use tags to further categorize and classify your items. For example, you can tag design concepts with labels like “Logo,” “Website Mockup,” or “Branding,” making it easy to filter and locate specific assets during client reviews.

• Facilitate Client Feedback: Invite clients to collaborate directly within Dropmark by sharing specific stacks with them. With tags in place, clients can provide targeted feedback on individual items, making the review process more efficient and actionable.

• Streamline Communication: By organizing assets with stacks and tags, you create a centralized hub where team members and clients can access relevant information quickly. Whether it’s discussing design revisions or sharing project updates, Dropmark provides a seamless platform for communication.

• Enhance Searchability: Tags play a crucial role in improving the searchability of your project assets. With descriptive tags assigned to items, you can easily locate specific files or resources using Dropmark’s powerful search functionality, saving time and minimizing frustration.

We hope you’ll use these tips on your next project and happy organizing! 🎉

Here at Dropmark, we’ve been at bookmarks a long time — twelve years to be exact. Like everyone else, we’re guilty of piling up interesting links in a “Read it later” collection, and then forgetting to actually read them despite our best intentions. Who is going to save us from this ever-growing backlog?

TLDR: Ditto is a friendly AI assistant here to help you organize your bookmarks and read it later smarter.

Powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Ditto is the ultimate tool for your Dropmark collections. Ditto is 100% optional, and you can opt-in at the collection level. With every link you save in a Ditto-enabled collection, Ditto rolls up its digital sleeves and gets down to business. You’ll automatically see:

1. Articles distilled into a brief summary (saving you precious reading time)
2. Suggested relevant #tags (making organization a breeze)

As a conversational assistant, Ditto does a whole lot more. Mention @ditto-bot to unlock a bucket load of features related to your bookmarks, for example:

• Extract formatted recipes 🥗
• Get bullet points from an article 📌
• Recommend related links 🌐
• Compare products for smarter shopping 🛍️
• Fetch addresses and crucial info 📍
• Create tidy shopping lists 📝
• And anything else you can think of! 💭

Consider Ditto as your shiny new team player, here to streamline your bookmarks. Eager to try it out? Sign up for early access at https://ditto.works and get ready to revolutionize your bookmark game! 💥