The Importance of Organizing Your Design Files and How to Develop Your Own Naming System

April 10, 2018

Are you a digital hoarder? Do you have tons of files on your computer or on a flash drive? Many designers have been taught to save their projects to show future clients their work. While most designers are pretty good at saving their files, they aren’t so good at organizing their files.

Most people have a single folder where they save everything. This works well if you only have a few files, but as your portfolio begins to grow, you’ll quickly find that it becomes very difficult to locate the specific file you’re looking for. The task of locating files becomes more complicated for people who don’t name their files appropriately. IMG01222018 sounds like a fine name at the time of saving your file, but when you come back later, you might find that you’ve forgotten the random combination of letters and numbers you previously used. Some people use the source name or some project initials to name their files. Although this is more structured than random letters and numbers, it can have the same problem of not being able to remember the source name or project initials in the future.

There are several ways to manage and organize your design files. Before we look at the ways to store, organize and manage your files, let’s talk about some best practices for your design files.

Always keep backup copies of your work. Things such as computer failures and natural disasters can destroy years worth of work. Try to have the backup copies of your work in two separate locations. That way, if something like a fire or flood occurs, you’ll still have access to your files offsite.
Decide how you’ll name and organize your files before saving your projects or moving existing projects to a new location. By choosing your organization system early, you can establish consistency throughout your projects. This simple step will save you a lot of time and the hassle of having to rename all of your previously saved project files.
Keep your organization system simple, but add the information you’ll need to locate that project in the future. It’s important to strike a good balance between simple file names and file names that indicated exactly what the project is.

Start by determining where you’ll save your files. A great place would be on an external hard drive or in a cloud storage folder such as Dropbox. After selecting where you’ll store your files, create a new folder within that location. This will be the starting point for all of your projects. For our example, lets say you’ve chosen to use Dropbox as the location you’ll be storing your design files. Within your Dropbox folder, create a folder with a name that represents the contents of that folder. You might choose to name that folder something like “Art Files” or “Design Portfolio”. The name you choose doesn’t matter. What matters is that you can easily identify that folder as the folder containing your design files. We’ll use the name “Design Portfolio” as our example folder. Within your Design Portfolio folder in Dropbox, create some subfolders the will represent the various projects you will be adding to the Design Portfolio folder. The subfolders will be named according to the project they relate to. This is where establishing your naming structure will come in.

There are several ways to structure your files, but some of the basic ways include: structuring them by date, by genre or by client. The system you choose should suit your design style and the way you work on projects. Now that you’ve selected your naming system, gather your design files and rename them according to the new system. After renaming your files place them in the appropriate folders and subfolders based on your system. That’s it! Your files are now organized and well managed. Going forward, you will need to save all new projects to the appropriate location. Make sure you name them according to your system. It can be tedious to set up a file system for your design projects, but managing your projects will be much easier in the future. By continuing to save files in the correct location using the correct names will keep your files organized, and it’ll make them easier to find in the future.