You may have noticed a new screen count indicator in Zeplin that now shows you the total number of screens in your project. We built this new indicator to show you when the total number of screens in a project exceeds 250.

If you see this message, there’s no need to worry – you can continue adding more screens to the project – but from our user research with thousands of teams who rely on Zeplin to keep designs organized, we’ve learned that:

Projects with over hundreds of screens can be challenging to navigate and manage effectively without unnecessary workarounds.
Having too many screens in your project is likely also affecting app performance and load times.

When your project reaches around 250 to 300 screens, we recommend moving existing or additional screens to new projects to improve navigability and app performance. If you don’t have the space to create more projects in your current plan, consider visiting our pricing page to purchase more projects or upgrade. If you have any questions, contact us using the chat bubble below.

💁‍♀️ If you want to move existing screens to a new project, you can right-click an individual screen or click the settings menu of a screen section.

How to set up & organize your projects

Products are living and breathing things; over time, they grow and change along with their design requirements. We suggest setting up and structuring your designs using the best practices outlined in this article to avoid screen management issues or performance/loading slowdowns.

What is a project?

Projects are one of Zeplin's top-level organizational features. They are a collection of designs that are accessible to project members.

💁‍♀️ On the Team, Organization, and Enterprise plans, you also have access to a workspace where you can organize your projects into sections as well.

How to organize your projects

Whether you are a new, current, or returning user, here’s how to think about projects, sections, and Zeplin’s other organization features to get the most mileage out of your current Zeplin plan:

Each project can be a feature, an epic, or a milestone that a specific team is working on
Each section in a project can align to a sub-feature or a story inside the feature/epic

Projects and sections in Zeplin can include lots of screens. This is where features like tags, variants and filters come in, to further organize your screens and keep your project tidy.

An important thing to note about projects is the members. Once an important change happens in the projects (e.g., a new screen is added), all project members will get notified about the change. If a project contains designs from multiple features or epics that are being built by different teams, project members will likely get notified of changes that are not relevant to them and end up ignoring them altogether.

This also applies to integrations. You can connect a Zeplin project to a Slack/Microsoft Teams channel. So you want to make sure that the project only contains content related to a single feature/epic to keep information and notifications organized.

When to create a new project

We recommend creating a new project when you’re kicking off a new feature/epic.

When the build on that feature/epic ends and your team moves on to the next feature/epic, that is a great time to create a new project. Technically, you could keep on adding new designs and additional members to the same project, but eventually, it can become challenging to navigate and find the designs you’re looking for.

When you do create a new project, you can keep the previous project active or alternatively, you can archive it. Archived projects can’t be accessed but you can always activate them later on when you need to. The upside of archiving an old project is that it frees up a project slot, especially if you’re on a plan with a limited number of projects.

Let’s break it down with an example

Based on our learnings from our users, here’s how we set up the workspace for our demo product, Snack Overflow.

Note that workspaces and workspace sections are only available on the Team, Organization, and Enterprise plans. But don't worry—these best practices for organizing your projects apply to all plans.

For Snack Overflow, we first thought about how there are multiple user groups that use the app — not just snackers on the prowl for their midnight fix but also the stores making and selling snacks, as well as the delivery drivers.

Here’s how Snack Overflow’s organizational hierarchy in Zeplin looks like:

Note that at the project level (under the “User Portal” workspace section), we put the Marketplace feature and the Payment feature in each of their own projects. Designers, devs, and PMs only join the projects they’re working on, so they only receive the notifications they care about. Within each project, we have sections that represent a sub-feature or a story.