Topical and Tropical

Rants, Raves, and Other Mindless Babble

Take Care of Your Files

Posted on February 20, 2009 in Design | comment bubble

One of my biggest pet peeves is people who don’t manage their files well. Now I completely understand that everyone is different, and everyone has their own system that works for them, but seriously, do you need 100 icons on your desktop? At this very moment I have all my files divided into 2 different folders on my desktop, one is for all things associated with my Human Radiator brand, and the other is a folder containing all the work I do for Notre Dame. Inside the Notre Dame folder I have projects folders that I try to keep to less than 700MB in size, for the specific reason of easily being able to back them up to CD. Inside those project folders, all of my projects are labeled with name and the current year. That way I have an immediate sense as to when the project was started. On a sidenote, lately I have been adding a project number in front of the project name that corresponds with the project number that was assigned in our time/project management system.

Drilling down further, almost all of my project folders have the same core set of interior folders … assets, docs, and mocks. Inside the assets folder is where I keep all digital materials such as photography, iStock downloads, Illustrator or InDesign files, etc., that I use to create the mockup. Documents such as information architectures, wireframes, and written content fill the docs folder and are separated into appropriate sub-folders. Finally there is the mocks folder. Scanning the mocks folder you will typically find a subfolder labeled _Currents that houses all the most recent mockups for a client. The reason for the underscore is so that it is always at the top of the list. Also in that folder you will find folders labeled Round 1, Round 2, and so forth, that serve as a way for me to version my work, in case a client would ever come back to me and say, “Can we go back to 3 versions ago?” Finally, in this same mocks folder, I tend to keep a folder named scraps, where I typically put concepts and sketches that I didn’t think would work for the particular project I was working on, but may work for someone else.

The last thing about file management that I want to mention has to do specifically with how design files are handled in Photoshop. When I start a new web design project, the very first thing I do is set my 960px wide boundaries. To do this, I have a preset 960px wide by 100px tall box generated by Photoshop, I make it an obnoxious red or green color, I drag and drop it in my document, and then I strike a couple of guides. To complete that process I then create a new layer folder with the name “Borders”, throw the 960 block in it, and hide the visibility. From there, it’s a crapshoot when it comes to what objects I place where and what order the layers are in, but one thing always remains the same. When I create a new layer in Photoshop, the very first thing I do is label it. Nothing frustrates me more when I take a handoff from a fellow designer and all I see when I open the layers palette is a stack of layers named “Layer 1, Layer 2, Layer 3, and oh yeah, Layer 54 has an adjustment layer applied to it. Good luck finding it.” That system is inefficient and causes unnecessary stress for a fellow designer or developer who have to decipher the mysterious code that was established. Once I have the mockup complete, and all my layers have appropriate names, and I then group them as if they were a legend for the mockup, so developers can read it like a book from the top down when they are chopping it up and coding it. And finally, unless you want other designers and developers to pull their hair out as they watch the spinning pinwheel of death, please use adjustment layers and complex masks carefully, as they add a ton of file weight, and more often than not, the effect can be achieved the exact same way without using them.

Morale of the story … take care of your files. The system that I have developed for myself seems to be working quite well and I can’t remember the last time I had a complaint from a developer because my files were difficult to interpret. If I can prevent frustration simply by taking a second and adding a layer name or collecting things in a folder then by all means I am going to do it.

2 Comments

On February 21, 2009, oAk said:

having a system is great. arbitrarily assuming yours is the best because it works for you is not so great. let’s take a look at the other side of the coin:

do you really have to have hundreds of icons on your desktop?

who cares? it’s my desktop. most of the time application windows are open and you can’t see it, and the desktop is a great place to drop PDFs and skitch screen grabs because it’s one click away from the “find attachments” dialogue box. when you’re emailing a PDF to a client, all you have to do is click “desktop>date modified” and pick the most recent file. I suppose I could bury my PDFs in a complex file structure requiring sequential naming and 5 clicks to uncover (assuming I remember where it was saved, but this way is easier. also, leaving all of those files on the desktop for a couple of days without deleting them means ALL of the various jpegs and PDFs that I am most likely to need going forward remain one click away AND they all get backed up in Time Machine automatically every hour. Although our server does back things up, no one has ever shown me how to easily and quickly recover the files, so I use Time Machine for this where possible, because I don’t have to think about it. Every two or three weeks when the icons need to be pruned I Select All and drag them to the trash. Even then they’ll sit in the trash can for a day or two in case I need them quickly.

I think it’s grand that you snap align only the most important icons on the desktop. you probably do this because it works for you. I don’t judge, it’s your computer. I will say that all of the organization in the world doesn’t do squat to help anyone looking for a file who isn’t intimately familiar with your personal file system. That’s why I put all of my essential job files on our central server. No one ever has to see my desktop, because my job files don’t exist locally on it.

The idea of trying to keep folders below 700MB is an interesting one. In all seriousness, that’s pretty clever. It sounds like a holdover from a time when your files were stored locally and had to be backed up regularly, but it is a clever idea. I use the terabyte of space on our central server to store those old files. Backing anything up on disk makes me twitchy because I know that the disk will either never be used again (common), or lost (very common if the disk has to be referenced in the future).

re: layers. some people’s brains don’t think in terms of naming layers in process. to me it’s like taking the time to write notes in the margins of a pencil sketch about the weight and thickness of each line as you are drawing them. My creative process is way too unstructured to do this. I’ve tried it. I create layers on the fly with option drag so quickly and in such large numbers that pausing in process to label everything is simply not conducive.

I am not unaware of the effect this has on developers, so I used to, at the end of a design process, when files were ready to hand off to the developers, go through and delete all hidden layer, rename layers, and (before Adobe bought Macromedia and it became unnecessary) created new layers out of each drop shadow and applied each layer mask and adjustment layer because these things used to not translate properly into dreamweaver. (this was especially true of layer masking).

As far as I know, this problem has been solved, and layer masks are a perfectly valid way to control layers and groups of layers that has no adverse translation effects for dreamweaver users. Also, to the best of my knowledge, no developer has ever told me which way they prefer. For the most part, I don’t select layers in the layer palette anyway, I use Auto Select Layer by holding down Command and clicking on the area I want to access. (Holding down, I think, Control while clicking with the Move Tool will bring up a quick list of all of the layers under that pixel as I explain here.)

Layer Masks and adjustment layers have a built in advantage that you are over looking and make for better PS files (albeit larger…you have a point there): Neither layer masks or layer styles destroy pixels. You can always undo or revise what you’ve done with them later, because they do not require you to lock in your changes. While it is true that you might be able to “get the same effect” most of the time without them, it’s not always (or even generally) true that you can do this and still retain as much control as possible.

A good example is a placed image (serving as a placeholder) to represent, for example a rotating homepage image. I would absolutely never place that file in my PS layers and clip it to the size I want. I would use a Layer Mask of the size I want. Why? Because if I ever need to change the arrangement of the image or the crop or whatever I can just click the lock on the layer mask and drag the image around until I’m satisfied, because all of the original pixels are still there. Layer Masking allows me to do this quickly and easily. Again: this USED to give Dreamweaver fits. It does not anymore. (Drop shadow opacity was another thing that didn’t translate well in the past that has been fixed so I don’t do a Create Layer on my Drop Shadows anymore either).

“Because it adds file weight,” is, in my opinion, not a good enough reason not to use a specific tool. Layers also add file weight, but we’re probably not about to flatten everything. If you’re only trying to avoid the spinning pinwheel, you may as well either 1) quit your other open applications 2) get a faster computer with more RAM. What you’re saying about the files being too big, is the same argument I hear from vendors who insist on not keeping their software current and require files to be provided in Illustrator 10 format. I don’t doubt that you find it frustrating, but the problem is not the file, it’s the hardware. If you find yourself limiting your designs so the computer doesn’t have to think, you need a new computer.
On February 23, 2009, Jim Gosz said:

@oak … you make some good points. I am merely saying that mine is best because it is best for me. And I don’t limit my design files so the computer doesn’t have to think. I limit the complexity of my files so the developers don’t have to think.