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.