Have you ever looked at your My Documents folder and felt like your files have taken a life of their own? I have. No matter much thought I put into organizing my files, I experience the same baffled expression every three or four months, depending on how many projects I did for the time frame. So, I try to come up with more effective ways of organizing my files and keeping my computer clutter-free.
If you are a graphic designer, then you definitely know what I'm talking about. As your clients increase, and the number of projects you do takes an upward turn, you need to be more vigilant in keeping your files organized. You would not want to mistakenly send the wrong graphic design to your client, especially if it is highly confidential. You would not also want to send an unfinished project to a client who is trying to beat a deadline. At best, you would give them the impression that you are just disorganized like so many artistic individuals. At worst, your client will think you unprofessional and you will lose future job assignments.
To avoid such situations, here are some simple tips on how to keep your graphic design files organized.
Create a single master folder for all you graphic design files. You can name this folder as "Graphic Designs" or any other name that you want to. This folder will hold all your graphic design files only. This is most imperative especially if you do other work besides graphic designing. This will ensure that your graphic design work remains separate from personal and other work files.
Create subfolders. If you have many clients, you can create a subfolder for each client. By doing it this way, there is less risk that you will send a client's file to another client. Another option is to create folders by project. The downside to this one is that if you have many projects, you will be seeing a lot of folders under the master folder. This might not look organized at all. So give careful thought on how you want to organize your files.
Create more subfolders. Should you choose to create folders for each client, then you will need to create subfolders for each project under that client. This will ensure that the graphic design files for one project do not go astray into another project. Doing it this way ensures that it will be easy for you to retrieve specific graphic design files later on.
This is basically everything that you need to know about organizing your graphic design files on your computer. Just make sure that you name all your folders correctly. For easy identification, you can use an acronym of the client at the start of the name, followed by the acronym of the project, and then the specific name of the file. You can also use numbers. It is important to make the name of your file easily identified with a particular client and project.
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