Share Tweet

Part Two: Organizing Your Other Desktop

In the first part of this series - Drawing Workplace Basics Part One: Cleaning Your Workspace, I explained how an organized physical workspace will do wonders for your productivity and efficiency if you make the commitment to maintaining it. In this episode, we are now going to get into the habit of doing the same thing on your computer.

Many artists who use the computer as their primary means of production often keep their files organized in the same manner as their desks – their stuff is everywhere. Proofs, samples, test files, source files and resources, finished products you name it, you’ve got it, and chances are its probably not where it should be. So I’m going to show you a few tricks on how to organize it so its easy to find months down the road when a client wants to recycle some of the old concepts you created for something new, or requires a reprint of a job.

Does this look familiar? Don’t you wish there was a better way of keeping things together? There is, and it surprisingly doesn’t take very long to do once you get used to the format. You don’t have to micromanage and be extremely anal-retentive in setting up your files – you just have to get used to placing things where they should be.

Here’s the easiest way of remembering the structure:

1. You have a client who needs something done
2. You need to do some research in order to create an initial concept
3. You need to send them a proof and possibly revisions
4. You need to create a final file – press/screen ready

Thats the basic gist of the in/out job process. So why not set your folder structure to follow this format? Follow these steps.

1. Create a base work folder (or call it WIP- Work in progress or Client Work, etc) – this way, you can separate your personal files from your client/work files.
2. Make subfolders listed by client name or client number or both (e.g.  133 – idrawdigital.com) – by labelling the folders in this fashion, you will have an easier time accessing them by simply reordering the folder list through Windows or OS X.
3. Make subfolders within the client folder with the job title (e.g under the 133 – idrawdigital.com folder you could have subfolders for posters, web animation, illustration, etc etc)
4. Inside the specific job folders, create three more folders titled – Working Files, Proofs, and Final
5. The Working files will contain all of your resource material, your drafts and versions of your working files and any client source material. You can go even further and make folders within your Working files folder to separate these items. But for now, anything that isn’t a client proof or the final working file goes in here.
6. The Proofs file is only for this – Proofs that go to the client in every revision stage end up in this folder. Remember to keep every single proof you create no matter how minute the change was. This way, if a client wants to revert back to a previous item from a past proof, you have it documented for reference (or in extreme cases where the client doesn’t think you did something and you did, you have proof – it happens…)
7. The Final file contains the final signed off files from the client, your final prepped file for production purposes and all the related source files needed to send out for production where applicable. You can expand on this further by creating folders titled Production and Client Signoff etc.

Your file hierarchy should look something like this:

WIP Folder
— 001 CLIENT NAME
———– Job Name
—————-Working Files
—————- Proofs
—————- Final Files
———————- Production Files
———————- Final Signoff/Working
———– Job Name
—————-Working Files
—————- Proofs
—————- Final Files
———————- Production Files
———————- Final Signoff/Working
———– Job Name
—————-Working Files
—————- Proofs
—————- Final Files
———————- Production Files
———————- Final Signoff/Working
— 002 CLIENT NAME
———– Job Name

and so on, and so forth. Do this for all your clients and it will be easier to categorize and catalog at a glance. Having dedicated folders for all your work is a sure-fire way of improving your efficiency now to create more time for yourself later. The easiest way to do this is to create a dummy folder with all of these subfolders already set up. The only thing you would have to do is change the job title and the client name. Copy the folder over to your WIP or Client work folder and paste it in and start organizing your files. It’s that simple!

Here’s what it looks like in action:

This is just a basic organizational structure. You can modify this in any way you feel will make you more organized and efficient. I hope this helps to increase your efficiency and maximize your time drawing, rather than searching. In my next article, we will move on to program specific routines that will assist in speeding up some of the menial tasks you face when working on your projects. Stay tuned for Part Three in the series!

Related Posts

• Tutorial: Drawing Workflow Basics – Part One
• Tutorial: Drawing Workflow Basics Part 3 – Shortcuts
• Tutorial: The Digital Workflow
• Tutorial: How Put Together a Webcomic
• Tutorial: The Tools of the Trade

Tags: Workflow

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 15th, 2009 at 8:08 pm and is filed under Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.