Hi everyone, this is Anne with Graphic Design How To, and today we're going to be
talking about graphic design, file structure, and folder structure
(and organization). Once you get a job in an agency or as an in house designer , a lot
of people, besides you, might need to access your files at some point. So you
need to keep your files named perfectly and have them organized in a way that
makes sense to everybody so they can find them easily or find them through a
search easily. And this also helps you come off as someone who
cares and who is detail oriented, which is a big deal. If you're a freelancer, you
might not actually be sharing your files with other people but it's a really good
way to help you find your files easily, too. Now as you'll notice as we're getting
into this, I'm a huge fan of long folder names and long file names, because you
can put a lot of keywords in there that will help people find your file.
It just really helps with search. Now first up, I have a "Freelance" folder. You could
also call this "Projects" or whatever you want to call it that holds all of the clients
and the projects that you have. Inside that we have a "Folders" folder.
And we also have two client folders. Now the way these are named are an acronym--SDT.
That stands for Senior Division Tactics. And I always have my own acronym, even
if a company doesn't go by an acronym. Now if we click this, we have two projects
inside. Let me make this a little bit bigger.
We've got SDT, which is the acronym that I came up with. Then we have the project
name, and then the project type. So our project name is "Streamlining Christmas"
and the type of project is a proposal. And here we have "The Benefits of Aging,"
which is the name of the white paper and 'whitepaper.' Alright, so if I click on
this one, I've got six different folders inside, that all have different purposes.
I've got a content folder and this is something that you'll probably get from
the writers or the content creators. This will probably be a Word document for just
anything that has to do with content. All that goes in here. Your document fonts
are all the fonts you use in your InDesign file or your Illustrator file.
And I usually don't have anything in this folder until the very end of the project.
When I package these files, InDesign actually makes a folder with
document fonts and links, and I take those out and stick them in the document
fonts folder. Edits are for any edits that come back from an internal customer like
your boss or maybe an account executive or external clients. This might
have emails in it, it might have photos that you've taken of a printed page with
red marks on it. I just keep all the edits right in here. And then info for project is
everything you get at the beginning of a project. This would be
your creative brief, any photos of notes that you might have taken during
meetings about this particular project, and just anything that doesn't fit
anywhere else in any of these folders. Links are actually the photos or PDFs
that you use in your project itself. A lot of times this might be empty too,
until the very end when you package your document. And then logos, this is
something that I just use personally because I hate to go and search for the
logo over and over again – the white version, the full color version, etc, so I
always just copy and paste them in here and then I have them throughout the
whole project, but I do delete them because they're usually stored on a
server somewhere. So you don't really need a whole bunch of copies of the
logos themselves. And then these are the actual projects. So these are the InDesign
files or Photoshop files, I don't put them in a folder but if you
wanted to, you could create a "Project" folder and put them in there. Now let's
go to the second project "The Benefits of Aging," white paper, and as you can see it
has all of the same folders inside it and then the project itself.
Now, sometimes you might find that you don't have any edits at all for this project.
So you might think, well, I want to delete that folder. I don't need it.
So I'm going to delete it. But personally, I don't think that's a good idea.
Because let's say a month out, your client comes back with a change.
And so you're like, "Oh, well, I deleted that folder. I'll just make a new one." So you make a new folder, but you're like,
"Oh, what did I call that...I don't quite remember.
So I'll call this 'Changes'." Well, now this has been put at the very top and if
someone is looking through your files, trying to find the edits, they're going to notice
that it's not where it normally goes. And they might have a little trouble finding it
if it's up here. So I really recommend keeping the folder structure the same
even if there are empty folders. It doesn't take a lot of space on your hard drive
to have empty folders. So I think it definitely makes sense to keep them
in there for that reason. Alright, so let's go to the second client.
We have an infographic here and we have all those same folders, with the projects
themselves as Illustrator files here. This is also the place where you'll want
to keep PDFs of your projects. I never add 'Final' to these because, you know, a
lot of times you'll have changes after that. But if you're going to send one of
the PDFs to a client, go ahead and take off the version, you can just have it say,
"TVW-tennis elbow infographic," and that will be fine to send to a client. Now the
last thing I want to talk about is this "Folders" folder up here. So if we click on
this, this just has all of the folders that you need for each of your projects.
So whenever I start a new project, I can just copy this. They're empty folders, I
can go ahead and create a new project. We'll call this one 'So and So Whitepaper.'
And then I'll paste all of those folders in here. Now I don't drag them from the
folders because then they won't be in there anymore. So it's always just a good
idea to copy and paste those. All right, I hope this folder structure video has
helped you come up with a new system for your files. I worked at different
companies over the last 18 years, and a couple of them use very similar systems
to this. And that's where I sort of stole it from. This has worked really well for me
in my freelance business and at new positions that I've taken.
All right, and that's my video for this week. If you liked it, please click on the "Like" button.
And I'll see you next week with another graphic design tutorial. Thank you!!!