Part of the job of a Graphic Designer is to manage a ton of files from layouts to image assets. When you are beginning in design you may develop a habit of downloading assets to your download folder, or start by opening up a document and simply save it to your desktop.
IT’s IN YOUR BEST INTEREST TO STOP THIS PRACTICE!
The more you continue to repeat this, the more you will develop a habit that will make your life more stressful, disorganized and will rob you of valuable time when you need it. It puts your work at risk and increases the probability of making mistakes at critical times. As you know, we deal with multiple details on a design project and when the pressure is on to meet deadlines — that is when we make mistakes in our work! It can impact your grade, and working for a company, impact your job, or working for a client, impact your working relationship and future work (a.k.a. future income and your reputation).
If you have not taken my advice seriously in my classes, then you will have a harder time to break this habit, as the more repetitive actions are performed, the harder it is to break them. According to the 20/90 rule, it takes 21 days to create a habit and 90 days to to make it a part of your work style where you don’t need to think about it. When you do, it will be like breathing, you’ll naturally do it without having to think about it. It will be much better for you in the long run to break bad habits now, than later.
Here’s and article about strategies to break habits: The Key to Building Lasting Habits
There are reasons why I am teaching you to develop good file management habits. And having had a life-long relationship with managing files, I am trying to make your life less-stressful and more enjoyable. It is not to torture you into some useless process that wastes your time. I am all about maximizing your workflow and design process. Life tends to become more complex, than simple. These strategies and good habits will serve you well in the chaos.
With that said, throughout my career, I have developed a naming conventions for my files that will work for you too. But, first I want to remind you of developing a good habit in the beginning of any project by creating a Project Folder.
I. PROJECT FOLDERS & FILE MANAGEMENT
ALWAYS. ALWAYS. ALWAYS.
I am using repetition for a reason here and a bold font if you haven’t noticed. And perhaps I was yelling. Why? Because, at times it seems as if my advice (requests, requirements) fall on deaf ears.
These requests are two-fold: 1) to teach you to be orderly in your file management practices that will decrease. your stress and improve your output; and 2) to decrease my stress of handling 100s of student work and keeping student work associated with each project.
Always start a project creating A PROJECT FOLDER.
It makes sense to name your folder with something that connects to the project. You may create a nonsensical name and that may work while you are working on the project, But be sure that when. you go back to make corrections, or you want to use some of the assets for another project—surely you will not remember what you called it.
KEEP YOUR FOLDERS ORGANIZED.
I was once advised by my Mac expert to not keep files on the desktop, although we tend to do that. I was told it is better to keep them in the DOCUMENTS folder. Most of the time, I stay to this advice. However, storing your files on your desktop WILL SLOW DOWN THE PERFORMANCE OF YOUR COMPUTER
(Source).
And I know that many students have computers and struggle just running Adobe CC. With that said, regardless of where you store your project folders—and I hope you are storing your work in designated project folders—if you are consistent in this practice, you will save hours when looking for assets, or project files.
CHANGE YOUR WEB BROWSER TO ASK WHERE TO DOWNLOAD FILES
This is important and something I went through our first day of class when we set up our desktops. Whichever web browser you use (Google, Safari, Brave, Explorer, Opera, Firefox, etc.) you need to find the Preferences for that browser and change the default from downloading into your “DOWNLOAD” folder that will become the garbage pit of gobble-de-gook eventually to “ASK WHERE TO SAVE FILE” or something to that effect. Every browser has different terminology for this action.
CREATE AN ASSET FOLDER IN YOUR PROJECT FOLDER
It is also wise to create an asset folder in your project folder. This will keep any image files, research documents, etc. separate from your design files. Many times you don’t have that many files for a project and thankfully you can create folders on the fly when. you are downloading. Try to refrain from the habit of simply placing your assets just inside your project folder. If you create one at the beginning, then when you are in the midst of cranking for a deadline, you’ll be able find what you need. This is especially important for larger projects (ie. Senior Project or a project with multiple collaterals) where you have many design files and a lot of support files. It can get visually distracting to quickly find your work and also the correct files.
No Stress. Just Design.
2. FILE NAMING CONVENTIONS
BE CONSISTENT. BE CONSISTENT. BE CONSISTENT.
The computer is programmed to sort things alphabetically, and we can use this to our advantage.
When I am handling hundreds of files a quarter, it is important for me to be able to have some automation and when students begin the file name using their last name, that helps me to: 1) see everyone in the class in alphabetical order, 2) helps with check to see if I have everyone’s work.
Here are a few examples of how to name your files for my classes:
LastName_ProjectName_4Review.pdf
LastName_ProjectName_Draft.pdf
LastName_ProjectName_Draft-1.pdf
LastName_ProjectName_FINAL.pdf
NOTE FOR SAVING PDFs FROM ILLUSTRATOR:
Please remove the word “copy” that is appended right before the file type and replace that with the appropriate word that describes the state of the file in the design process—ie. Draft-1, Draft-2, FINAL.
That way you and I can visually identify which file is your first draft and which is the final print file.
SPACE THE FINAL FRONTIER — CAUTION SPACES!
Remove any spaces between file names!
Computers don’t like spaces and your files may become corrupted if you use them in your file names—so use them at your own peril. Best practice is to use underscores (_) or hyphens (-) if you need to visually separate the words in your file names. Often a tactic that programmers use, is to use Initial caps with no spaces between file names or when naming instances. This is called camelCase.
A space in a filename can cause errors when loading a file or when transferring files between computers. Common replacements for spaces in a filenames are dashes (-) or underscores (_). Alternatively you can also use a technique called camelCase which uses letter case to separate name elements.
Since we work primarily on MacIntosh Computers (a UNIX-based system), this system does not like spaces. If you work on a PC (primarily Microsoft Software a NTFS-based system—New Technology File System) they are making spaces more compatible, so there are different norms that you need to be aware of with operating systems. If you choose to work in Microsoft-land, it is your responsibility to get to know the evils of that system. The Graphic Design and Advertising industry primarily work in Mac environments. Macs were built to handle large file processing speeds and graphics rendering.
You may be thinking, “Why do I have to know this stuff? Isn’t this what computer geeks need to worry about?” Well, the reason is the design field works almost exclusively in the UNIX world on Macs, while the corporate work-a-day world of non-designers work on Microsoft platforms. And the war has been going on since the epoch of computer software. And so we need to know how to prepare our files so that they will not become corrupted. Graphic Designers are often entrusted with private data, and also valuable files (mind-share) for our clients and we must be responsible digital users who know how to manage the files we create on the systems we work in.
So the next time a computer geek, or a mathematician, or an engineer, or philosopher implies that graphic design is just pushing buttons, KNOW that besides understanding the elements and principles of developing aesthetically pleasing work and creating solutions that effectively communicate an intended message, you actually understand the inter-workings of computers! We live with technology every day. And we need to understand how to fix things, change toner cartridges, fix “ugly box syndrome,” prepare files for web and physical printing besides know how to operate complex ever-changing software, along with the operating systems it exists in!
BESIDES SPACES, HERE ARE OTHER CHARACTERS TO AVOID (DO NOT USE) WHEN NAMING FILES
– Back and Forward Slashes – these are used to route files to directories
– Question Marks and Asterisks
– Colons and Vertical Bars
– Quotation Marks and Apostrophes
– Trailing Periods (…)
– Greater Than and Less Than Signs (> <)