Intro to Freehand
  • 23 Jun 2023
  • 2 Minutes to read
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Intro to Freehand

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Article summary

Freehand is an intelligent canvas designed to bring everyone—designers, engineers, project managers, even HR—together to do their best work. Freehand connects all the tools you and your team already use, making it the central hub for end-to-end product development and cross-functional collaboration. Manage projects, run client sessions, onboard new team members, and more, in real time and asynchronously.

Interactive tutorials

If you're looking for interactive tutorials and training, we built several templates to help you get started. What better way to learn about all Freehand has to offer than by experiencing it yourself?

Do more with tools and templates

Freehand's tools and templates help you and your team do more, together. Freehand's tools offer practicality alongside fun, functionality, and interactivity. From polls and spinners to timers and GIFs, there's a tool that does it—and even more to discover.

Templates are pre-built layouts designed to help you run great meetings, hand off designs, and even get to know your team. But don't limit yourself to just one template! Insert multiple templates into the same freehand to work the way you need to. Use smaller building block templates, such as a sticky note pack, emoji pack, or a timeline, to meet your needs.

Find tools and templates under Explore in every Freehand document.

Let's put it all together and look at how you can use Freehand for project planning and ideation.

Planning and ideation

Freehand's ever-growing gallery of templates and tools help teams brainstorm, plan, and ideate.

With the Wireframe tool, teams can collaboratively ideate through several design sprints. When you're ready to go from wireframes to designs, embed your prototypes, whether Figma, Adobe XD, or Sketch, into the freehand document. By embedding prototypes into Freehand, you get the power of real-time and asynchronous collaboration to help you and your team revise, iterate, and move from brainstorming to delivery. Everyone who views the freehand can review the evolution of the project and collaborate, all in one place.

If you're following Agile processes, there are templates for that! Browse the Freehand template gallery, and check out templates for sprint planning and retrospectives from Atlassian and InVision. Import your epics and stories right into the template with our Jira, Asana, Azure DevOps, and Trello tools to support team discussions and Agile ceremonies.

Cross-functional and inclusive collaboration

Freehand brings teams together around projects. Instead of spending time exporting work into other formats or wrangling share links, you can focus on creating meaningful user experiences in collaboration with your team.

Freehand lets anyone on your team join from anywhere, on any device, to weigh in on your concepts and designs. With visitor access, even external stakeholders, such as a client or contractor, can join a freehand temporarily to review, comment, and collaborate.

Freehand's built-in commenting tool supports in-depth, threaded discussions on individual screens or elements. Harness the power of reactions to gather qualitative feedback from anyone. Need to do a quick vote on a winning design? Find out your team's top burning questions to answer in a meeting? Throw down some reactions on sticky notes, text, or embedded prototypes.

Ready to hand off designs to engineering? With the Inspect tool, your engineering teams get access to all the information they need, while having visibility into the history of the project.

Central hub for all your tools

Freehand's extensive integrations and tools bring all your existing tools together into the digital canvas. Whether it's embedding Figma designs or Google documents, livening up a meeting with Giphy, setting the mood with Spotify, or recording Loom videos for asynchronous collaboration, you can bring together everything you're already doing in Freehand.

Our list of integrations and tools is always growing, so read the Freehand release notes often.


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