A design tool for teams: Gradiently workspaces in practice

A good design tool for teams keeps three things in one place: the brand’s look, the people allowed to change it, and the conversation about the work. In Gradiently that place is a workspace, part of Pro. It holds the team’s brands, each with its own Mark and brand kit, every design made on them, and everyone who makes them, with owner, admin, editor and viewer roles. Feedback is pinned to the design, versions are kept, and one design becomes every size in a step.

Why teams drift off-brand

It rarely happens on purpose. One person picks a slightly different blue, another stretches the logo, a third tries a new font because the old one wasn’t on their laptop. Six months later the feed looks like six companies. The usual cure is a long guidelines document that people read once. Brand consistency explains why repetition matters; the practical answer is to make the right look the default, so nobody has to remember it.

Setting up a team workspace

1. 1

   Create the workspace

   Settings › Workspaces › New workspace. It starts empty, with you as owner.

2. 2

   Set up the brand

   Add the brand and its Mark. Fill in the brand kit: logos, palettes, heading and body fonts, voice, audience and what the brand does. It can read your website to fill in the name, description, colour and icon.

3. 3

   Make three anchor designs

   A post, a story and a wide banner that show how the brand should look. Your team copies from these.

4. 4

   Invite the team

   From Settings › Team, by email, each with a role. Links work for seven days.

5. 5

   Agree how feedback works

   Comments on the design, a mention for whoever needs to act, resolve when done.

The order matters. Invite people before the brand kit is ready and their first designs will set the wrong precedent. Setting up your brand kit walks through every field, and workspace roles helps you decide who gets which role.

One look the whole team shares

The look lives in the brand, not in anyone’s memory. Each brand carries its own Marks, the living gradient and material backgrounds its designs wear, and its kit. The brand switcher at the top lists the brands in the workspace; a new design starts on the chosen brand’s primary Mark with its fonts, and Apply brand kit brings a stray page back in line in one step.

Words stay readable whoever places them. A Mark knows where the text sits, moves its calmest region behind it and picks light or dark type line by line with Auto ink, so a junior designer’s headline reads as well as the art director’s. Because every Mark has exactly one owner, the look the team shares is also one no competitor can claim while you hold it.

Feedback, versions and sharing

Design feedback that helps and version history cover each in more depth. For stakeholders who only ever approve, a viewer role or a share link is enough.

Making more with fewer hands

Teams spend a surprising share of the week on production rather than design: resizing, swapping names into event posters, making the same promotion for six platforms. Pro covers most of it.

• Every size at once. Copy to sizes remakes a design for each format you tick.
• Bulk create from a spreadsheet. One page plus a CSV of names, dates or prices becomes a page per row, and one Undo removes the batch.
• The Designer. Describe what you need; it writes in the kit’s voice and lays the design out in the brand’s Mark.
• Your own AI assistant. Owners and admins can create an API key so ChatGPT, Claude or another MCP client makes designs that land in the workspace, without spending Gradiently credits.