Organizing Your Client Folders
ORGANIZING YOUR CLIENT FOLDERS
One of the biggest obstacles young designers must overcome early in their careers is developing a system for organizing their client work. Establishing a strong system for your files early will reduce the stress of client traffic down the road, and also provide you with more time to focus on the creative side of being a designer.
Unfortunately for me, my collegiate education didn’t provide me with a structured system for organizing files. For the most part my teachers would say, “Figure out a system that works for you” rather than saying, “Here’s what I do, and I do it this way because ______.” To this day I still don’t know what they were trying to protect by not being more direct in this regard. Perhaps they were guarding the secrets needed to unlock teaching at a state college. I’ll never know for sure.
I didn’t fully develop a strong system for organizing my client work until I was employed full-time at a design agency. The company used a universal system for tracking each client, as well as all the individual projects and project revisions associated with that client into a neat little package.
Let’s go over the steps of organizing a new client and a new job from said client.
So let’s say Bob Industries, Inc. has hired you to do a logo for their new line of Bobbing Betty’s or something of equal importance.
First I would begin by shortening Bob Industries, Inc to just BI, or BobIn, or BIn, or something short that you’ll be able to identify at a glance from a list of many other clients.
The next step will be to add a JOB FOLDER within that file that will tell us four things:
1. The name of the client (appropriately abbreviated)
2. The year the job was created in
3. The order you received it (this is also referred to as the “Job Number”)
4. The name of the job
For high traffic clients with a lot of jobs coming in and out each month, it would probably be smart to create a new job folder for each month. This way when you have to refer back to it later (and oh yes you will) you’ll have a better of idea of where to find it.
For example:
The next step is to organize your JOB FOLDER with the three ingredients that every job needs:
1. The artwork folder – this is where you will put all your reference material and custom artwork for the job ahead (things like pictures, vector graphics, and custom fonts)
2. The layouts folder – this is where you will house your initial designs as well as all the revisions you have to make
3. The notes folder – this is where you put EVERYTHING the client sends you about the project, including the inevitable revisions
It’s important to delegate relevant files accordingly to each folder as they become available, and not let them build up in one central spot, like your DESKTOP, or in the DOWNLOADS section of your hard drive.
The final step is to organize your Layouts and your Notes folders for easy chronological reference.
A lot of the time when we put work away for the day we put it out of our minds entirely. When we come back to it later on using a simple numbering system makes jumping back into the project all the easier.
When pertaining to the LAYOUTS folder, I know exactly which folder to draw my files from because I know it was saved in the highest numbered revision folder.
Each time you receive new revisions from a client, you should go into your LAYOUTS folder and create a “REVISION X” folder and copy the most recent file you were working on into that one. Then rename it with the appropriate abbreviation at the end:
You do this because:
Duplicating the last file and working from a new one may seem like a waste of hard drive space, but in this industry it’s paramount that you be able to refer back to every revision you’ve done for a client. You should always be prepared to deal with any situation, and having all your files saved this way creates a kind of “checkpoint” system much like those in video games.
In a different way, however, I manage my NOTES folder by using a simple “date code” that refers me to the exact date of which I received the client notes. This is an important difference because the client will be often refer to their notes in this way.
I usually leave documents I have to refer to frequently loose in the main NOTES folder. I hate having to dig for them.
That’s pretty much it. What do you think? Do you use something similar?
Drop me a line and me know if you’re confused by anything I’ve shown here. I’d love to help ya out.
Stay Creative,
James
About Jimmy
It looks like we both basically work the same! I do have to admit to not always working with this method but about once a week I do sit down and organize each persons file.
I tend to work like this
CLIENT NAME
– Project Name
– Resources
– ILOVETHISCOLOR.jpg
– bad_inspiration_image.jpg
– Notes
– PhoneConvo13012.txt
– PhoneConvo21512.txt
– Previews
– ProjectName_Preview1.png
– ProjectName_Preview2.png
– Authoring Files
– project
– Project Name #2
Where I fall short admittedly is with the authoring files. I need to take some of the ideas you have here and utilize them!
Also, a question. When a project is signed off on and paid, do you delete the preview/unused files? I do becasue I tend to have the authoring files and such.
ugh. well… that sucks. my leading spaces showing the nesting is all gone, so now i just look like a slob haha!
Haha, that’s ok I think I understand a good bit without the indents. I can figure out what’s a main folder and what’s inside based on off the file extensions.
As for your question, I don’t ever delete anything, mostly because where I worked we never did. Sometimes I scribble ideas onto the side of art boards while I’m working, or I do something that I like that gets changed in a later version and it can be helpful for future projects to be able to go back and dig up old ideas. For the most part though I barely touch old files after I archive them.
Thanks for commenting
Good reading here, great insights. Keeping everything filed away in an appropriate manner is such a big problem for me. Since I do graphic, photo and video- keeping all those files straight sometimes is a hassle and a half. I do something similar to you. I’ve set up a file system where it falls into one of those three; Photo, Video or Graphic. After that it gets filtered through by year, then either a monthly folder system (for high volume, as you mentioned) or stand alone projects. And then within each project folder I then sub-folder it further. If I’m doing a graphic design, I’ll put the .psd or .ai files in one folder, then all the stock files in another, and then all the final renderings in another folder. I used to be all willy-nilly and didn’t give a crap, until I had more projects and couldn’t find anything. I think I now understand why my mother wanted me to clean up my room all those years ago; she was preparing me.
Wanted to add that I do like the idea of a “notes” folder. Will have to start using that one.
When I was growing up all my actions figures and their corresponding weapons used to go into one bag, trains and toy cars into another, larger toys into another larger box, and so on down the list of other play things until everything was stowed away into something of appropriate size. I never did a great job of keeping their separate receptacles organized, and I used to lose toys all the time. Then some time later I would be digging through a random box looking for one thing and would discover something entirely different and begin playing with that, completely forgetting about whatever it was I was looking for in the first place.
I still do that same thing today with files I created before I began using my current system. It’s kind of funny how I still do that, only with different things. I think I was diagnosed with ADD when I was younger, but I’m pretty sure I’ve repressed it, haha.
Additionally…
I think the “Notes” folder is a good solution to keeping track of what EXACTLY comes in from the client. I also keep the files backed up as their original emails on my computer too in case I ever have to refer back to something. Not everything comes in a word .doc or something easily save-able so I often need to cross-reference. It may be a good idea to save emails themselves into the notes folder. I will have to experiment with this.
Do you save the actual emails in the notes folder? Or just the attachments?
Hey Kurt, it really depends on what’s in the email. If it’s copy or copy changes I usually just leave them in the email and note the date for reference if I ever need to go back. I always save the file attachments to Source though.