Digital Collaboration and the 21st C.

These interactive, real-time collaboration tools make designers' work easier - wherever you are in the world.

A team of designers does not always work in the same office; you work in distributed groups, and clients can be based all over the world. This is where collaboration tools come in - they make it easier and faster for designers to get feedback and approve artwork in a professional manner.

These apps come in many varying formats, with some that are created specifically for designers, some that serve as a concept crafting whiteboard, those with tools to make simple annotations, and some are all-in-one web apps that include an element of project management.

Here we gather together 10 of the best available online tools to allow designers to take part in collaborational work in real time.

The first five tools are for collaboration on existing work and mock-ups, whereas the latter five (from 06. to 10.) are best used for concept drafting and brainstorming.

Social collaboration is becoming increasingly important within organisations and it’s easy to see why. Research outlined in this infographic demonstrates how collaborative software can significantly improve team efficiency.

According to a recent survey, online collaboration tools will play an important role in 75% of businesses by 2013. As we are already accustomed to social networking with friends, family and (sometimes) customers, using social software to collaborate within organisations seems a logical progression.

Despite this, it is astonishing to see how much time companies waste by using email for internal communications. Professionals send and receive over 300 business emails a week and spend an average of 2-hours a day reading and responding to them. Just as worrying is the number of documents we share using email – an average 15 a day. This makes it impossible for more than one person to make edits and it quickly becomes difficult to keep track of changes.

This handy infographic from Clinked (above) shows how social collaboration software can remedy this. Collaboration tools can help to reduce email volume by 30% and make it 33% faster for teams to draft documents. According to one study, 97% using of businesses using social software said they could service more clients, more efficiently.