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While there are many software packages out there that will help
you organize and catalog your items (whether it be designs, images,
music, etc.), many, if not most, are costly, confusing and yet-another-thing
to learn.

Today I want to tackle the task of organizing your designs on the cheap.
We will just use the standard Windows file system (though this can be
readily done on a Mac). I am going to talk about methods of organizing,
not any OS-specific functionality, so this can be readily applied to any
type of file on any system.

So the first thing we need to analyze is what kind of designs we have,
and what would be our best strategy for beginning to organize them.
With that in mind, we need to figure out how many ways we can categorize
them. Off the top of my head, I can think of a few
possibilities right away:

What Went Wrong?, Fifth Edition: Case Histories of Process Plant/Skeletal Imaging (2nd, 10) by Taylor, John A M - Hughes, Tudor H -/Applied Economics and the Critical Realist Critique (Routledge INEM/Action Figures of the 1960s (A Schiffer Book for Collectors)/Animated Biological Concepts: Worksheets Paperback Book and DVD

• Few or same designers (One/Few particular company(ies) or your own)
• Many designers
• Design collections
• Genre or sub-type of designs (animals, flowers, etc.)
• Size of designs (We should make a mental note about these, since changing the size by more than 20% degrades the quality of the design, and from my experience, thats even pushing it).

Let's see if we can create some possible structures for the examples above.

Let's take the first case of having just a few different designers, or you
digitize your own designs. If we are sure that the amount of designers is going
to stay static and you will not be growing the number of different design suppliers,
then it would make sense to start thinking about what kind of designs you have.

Precontractual Liability in European Private Law (The Common Core of/The 2007 Import and Export Market for Glycosides, Glands or Other/Likelihood of Confusion in Trademark Law (Practising Law Institute/Assessing Lawyers' Ethics: A Practitioners' Guide Paperback/Cognitive Psychology 4th Edition by PhD, Douglas Medin Ross, Brian/Kiefer, Barbara's Charlotte Huck's Children's Literature (Children's/Human Motivation: A Social Psychological Approach (Psychology) 1st/Les Paroles choc de Jésus (French Edition)/Psychiatric and Mental Health Essentials in Primary Care Paperback/Larson, Edward J.'s Trial and Error: The American Controversy Over

If you have a specific target audience, let's say you do baby clothing or
pet items, then your categories could be limited to Boy/Girl/Pet type,
Seasons, Holidays, etc. One thing to keep in mind as we start subdividing
the categories is that you can get pretty granular, but there's a point
of diminishing returns. What we want is the ability to think,
"OK, I need a bib design for a baby girl that has a cute Christmas saying" and
be able to know exactly where in your computer it resides.

So let's start building our catalog. We have, as examples, the following
starting directories:

[top-level]/Baby Designs/Boy/Holidays/Christmas
[top-level]/Baby Designs/Boy/Holidays/Thanksgiving
[top-level]/Baby Designs/Boy/Holidays/New Year
[top-level]/Baby Designs/Girl/Holidays/Christmas
[top-level]/Baby Designs/Girl/Holidays/Thanksgiving
[top-level]/Baby Designs/Girl/Holidays/New Year

Notice how we structured based off the gender. If your business is less reactive
(on-demand), then a variation of the above could be more beneficial to you:

[top-level]/Baby Designs/Holidays/Christmas/Boy
[top-level]/Baby Designs/Holidays/Christmas/Girl
[top-level]/Baby Designs/Holidays/Thanksgiving/Boy
[top-level]/Baby Designs/Holidays/Thanksgiving/Girl
[top-level]/Baby Designs/Holidays/New Year/Boy
[top-level]/Baby Designs/Holidays/New Year/Girl

The choice of how to subdivide the categories is very important, and can only
be done after analyzing your own personal needs.

If our business is not as targeted, and we use many different sources of designs,
then we have a different situation. What we need todo is, once again, look at our
customer base and the type of work we're asked to do.

[top-level]/Designer 1/Holidays/...
[top-level]/Designer 1/Animals/...
[top-level]/Designer 1/Flowers/...

Again, this is subject to how you work. We could just as well do the following:

[top-level]/Holidays/Designer 1/...
[top-level]/Animals/Designer 1/...
[top-level]/Flowers/Designer 1/...

Putting it all together, we could have the following structures:

[top-level]/Baby/Bibs/Bunnies
[top-level]/Baby/Bibs/Bears
[top-level]/Baby/Bibs/Flowers
[top-level]/Bags/Fleur De Lis
[top-level]/Bags/Lace
[top-level]/Shirts/Holidays/Christmas
[top-level]/Shirts/Holidays/Halloween
Most recent patterns:
Countermovements in the Sciences: The Sociology of the Alternatives/Oxford Desk Reference: Critical Care/Origen: Contra Celsum/Black Canyon of the Gunnison, CO -Trails Illustrated Map  245/Darwin and Faulkner's Novels: Evolution and Southern Fiction First/Existentialism, Feminism and Simone De Beauvoir by Mahon, Joseph/Rubber Technology 2E: Compounding and Testing for Performance/The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy/Social Justice, Legitimacy and the Welfare State/The Joyous Wedding for Solo Trumpet & Organ (Code No. 159)
[top-level]/Shirts/Holidays/Thanksgiving
[top-level]/Socks/Holidays/Christmas/Snowmen
[top-level]/Socks/Holidays/Christmas/Snowflakes

So there you have some suggestions on how to organize your designs,
and keep things where you can find them.

Next column, I will build on this concept, and show you how you can tag the
designs you own for easy searching.