GridIron Flow: Revolutionary Workflow Maps Simplify Creative Pro Design Process

GridIron Software announced GridIron Flow, new digital content management software for creative professionals working on graphic design, web, and video projects. Flow automatically tracks the design process from idea to end result and manages assets and applications for the most complex workflows.

"Creative Professionals now have an easy way to visualize their design process and share their projects with a colleague, ship them to a client or archive them for safe keeping," said Steve Forde, CEO of GridIron Software. "We are excited to be demonstrating Flow at MacWorld and look forward to delivering this powerful solution for Mac and PC later this year."

Flow uses a sophisticated system to automatically track workflows by recording all Import/Export, Save/Save As, and Copy/Paste actions in a project. It understands the file formats for virtually all creative professional applications, including those from Apple and Adobe, and maintains the relationships between stills, movies, sound clips, fonts, plug-ins, and color swatches on all local, network, and removable storage devices.

Using Real-Time Asset Tracking technology, Flow automatically builds Workflow Maps for every project. A Workflow Map shows the files used in the workflow and how they are connected to one another. Workflow Maps display all related application project files, media assets, and internal structures such as comps and layers. By selecting any file in the Workflow Map, users can view its fonts, color swatches, and the application plug-ins used to create it.

Kept under tight wraps until now, the few creative professionals who have seen Flow eagerly anticipate its availability:

"Even with a brief overview I immediately recognized how Flow will allow me to take control of my computer in a way I never imagined," said John Dickinson, senior broadcast designer and founder of Motionworks. "Imagine, an intelligent assistant working behind the scenes, not only giving you access to your files in a whole new way, but showing you the relationship between files and watching your back in case you try to delete something you shouldn't. Amazing!"

"Flow looks to be the answer we have all been waiting for. Versioning and pipeline tracking is now accessible and easy to understand. It is a valuable tool for my studio," said Jonathan Hicks, art director and principal of Post Factory, a post production facility offering creative design, post production, and special effects.

"I wish Flow was developed a couple of years ago," said Joost van der Hoeven, founder and owner of Animotion, a boutique audio visual design studio in the Netherlands.

Flow can capture a point in time snapshot of any project that tracks everything that went into its creation, including media files, fonts, color swatches, applications and plug-ins, which can easily be archived to save or hand-off to the client. Project Archives include a Workflow Map showing how everything fits together, so when a project is sent to the printer, client or colleague, or burnt to disk, everything needed to reproduce it is there.

Other features in Flow include a Workflow Calendar that displays the time, date, and duration of projects for up to a year; Visual Versions which automatically track versions of media files, including thumbnails and metadata, as a project evolves allowing users to easily revert to a previous version of a file anywhere in their workflow; and Tags and Annotations, which provide tags and sticky-note style annotations to assets or projects and support custom tags and metadata standards. In addition, GridIron offers the Flow SDK to tool vendors to make it easy for them to create custom extensions to support their file formats and add new functionality to the Flow environment.

Flow will be available this summer for Mac OS X Tiger and Leopard and for Windows XP and Vista. For more information and to sign up for the upcoming Public Beta visit http://www.gridironsoftware.com.

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