Hi everyone. I'm struggling to work on one of my New Years Resolutions, which was to streamline my digital workflow. (I've found that when my project files are nested twenty subfolders deep, I'm overcomplicating things.) So I'm asking around to the different online communities I'm a part of for examples and suggestions on how other people organize their project files.
In addition to a webcomic (still just a "hobby" at magicalspacepony.com), I usually juggle a half dozen freelance comic book projects (www.newcreationnow.com among others) at any one time ranging from the creative writing to production art to complete digital prepress for books in progress. So for any given project, I normally have dozens to hundreds of different files ranging from word processing documents of scripts and plot notes; scanned artwork of the preliminary layouts and pencil art; high-res Photoshop files of the final B&W inks and colors; custom font sets used for each issue; Illustrator logos, Illustrator lettering templates for each page of the book; InDesign page layouts for the complete book; low-res PDF previews for my co-creators to review each stage of the work in progress, and hi-res final PDFs for print. And each file normally goes through several rounds of revisions where I have to keep version A, B, C, D, etc. clearly identified and available for comparison. Whew!
I do similar creative work for my "day job" at a print production company -- but there they have all the projects carefully indexed on several terabytes of high-speed servers and the file organization and backups are handled by a full-time team in the IT/Archiving department. Not something I can efficiently replicate on my home computer on a shoestring budget with only my spare time to manage it.
So, all that to say... Any suggestions? How do my fellow creative types organize the files, folders, and other pieces of their digital projects?
Replies
The only thing I have to add: make sure all your files are descriptive of what they belong to.
i.e. AllAboutCodingCover.filetype, AllAboutCoding_001.filetype, AllAboutCoding_002.filetype.
The issue I have is the constant revisions, which end up in a subfolder, and the next round of revisions ends up in a subfolder of the subfolder and on it goes... and sometimes it gets confusing really quick. So I feel your pain.
The one thing I have learned: NEVER EVER CALL A FILE OR PUT IN THE FILENAME FINAL - because inevitably someone will have changes needed - but they need the original to confirm the changes against... and if you've labeled it FINAL...well...where else can you go?
Not sure how much this applies, but one company i worked for, fore every issue, simply numbered the pages as "01" "02" etc. Which works if all your file folders are labeled correctly, but the frustrating thing is that if you make mistakes, get an issue folder number wrong, etc. then it can be hard to make sense of things again. So i find using a title and page number works
"Mousecapades01" or something.
I'll admit, for my webcomic pages, I do simply number them, since that's how my site is set up.
Also, i try to do less subfolders- except maybe for archives.
i dunno, but those seem to work for me...