Kelsey Elder is a typographer, brand/experience designer, and assistant design professor at CMU. Due to the complexity of his work, Kelsey advocates for systematic back-end design practice and organization as a core part of any designer’s practice. Join us as we delve into why file organization is so important for designers.
As creatives, we generally use our devices or computers in three primary ways, especially when we're in school. We use them in personal ways for things like photos, tax returns, and things like that; we use them in an ****academic way, such as keeping track of our classes, documents, and designs; and we use them in professional ways. If I were to broadly describe my file management, I have three parent folders for these categories.
In terms of where they sit, I use a three-legged backup strategy. I work out of Dropbox for the cloud, which is great because they can do time-machine backups. I also back up working folders to a hard drive—a LaCie drive—every night. Every Sunday morning I also do time machine backups to the behemoth at my home studio desk.
Generally, I always ensure I have two folders that say “in” and “out.” Inside the “in” folders are contracts, original files from the client, emails—all sorts of detailing guts. The “out” folder is where I package the design, and it’s generally the same thing I send to the client. Depending on the client you're working with, those people might already have a folder structure or a file naming system that you have to work within. I try to mimic either the agreed-upon structure that I have with the client, but I always have a simple read-me text document, where I just outline notes. Sometimes those notes are for the client—like how to install the typeface or use the tool that I've made for them—and sometimes it's internal for me to remember what I did or how I did it or the things that it made me think about.
I think it's important that we practice sustainable archive and backup strategies because when we enter a team situation, ideally we're handing off files that are self-explanatory and easy to navigate to our collaborators and clients. That's how we add value and experience to what we do beyond just the artifacts that we make, by putting care into how someone receives it or is able to navigate it.
I'm a CrossFit coach, so I'm always thinking about relationships between my experiences with athletes and my experiences with students. I found that when we design, oftentimes we're so eager to get to work that we forget to stretch or warm up first, so it becomes hard to manage both your source file and outcome files because you moved too fast into the design process. That’s why it’s helpful to first start by making a structure for our ideas and get into the habit of “stretching” before we sit down.
Another important tip is to think about keywords in your file naming system. Try to name both folders and file names with easily identifiable tags that become very easy to search through Spotlight or a finder window and structure it so that it goes from the broadest bit of information to the most descriptive.
We had a pre-press class in undergrad where I learned a lot about file management and that's been helpful all through my career. Recently, I was working on a typeface for the Dutch Library where I was getting cheeky and I was like “I'm going to create this like crazy drawing inside of this glyph” which resulted in a complex illustration inside of a font file. Now, font files are great, but they're not great at storing a lot of points, nodes, and handles inside of a single glyph space—so my file was corrupted. It's something I haven't mentioned yet, but get in the habit of versionally saving every single major change that you make so you can always return to your last save point like a game and not lose progress. This really saved me because I had saved the version before I added that character, so I managed to salvage my corrupt file by cracking it open in a text editor and deleting the problematic data/information that was causing the issue. That would have been crunchy, otherwise.
<aside> 💡 Liked what Kelsey had to say? Consider taking Kelsey’s course Typeface Design: Variable next fall!
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