Best Resources for the "Meta-Organization" of single files? When to split files? How to organize them?

[mpstaton]

Okay, so, I'm still a bit of a n00b but I've been using Affinity Designer 2 relentlessly for the past few months. 

My files are in shambles. As someone with the point of view of UI work and software engineering, the entropy to complexity multiplier is unmanageable. And I'm one person with only about three months of work. When do you use Artboards. When do you use Groups. When do you use Layers. When and how and why do you put one inside the other. What naming conventions do you use. 

At what point do you use Embeds from other files rather than keeping it in the same file? What is an Asset?  How do you reason about what should be an Artboard, what should be an Asset, and what should be an Embed?  

Assuming you are using all these different doohickies with aplomb, how do you structure the files(directories for nerds) and have naming conventions so you can sort and find and then not mess up all the dependencies between one files and the many files that are called upon?

Not to plug Figma, but they're slightly better about this in very steal-able ways. There's the somewhat recent "Section" feature that is radically simple but has made life SO much easier. Not to mention, they have a little button called "Tidy" which then magically organizes all the included objects that can be tidied and then suddenly they are looking rather tidy.  Then of course the famous Autolayout which still misbehaves if you are going deep, but is actually elegant to just make a compelling display of your asset/component library.

This all could be solved through some kind of consumer or small team "Digital Asset Management" tool, but they all seem to be enterprise and ugly and expensive anyway. Even if I was using one, then there's the issue around the Embeds and Assets and what not.  

I'm starting to feel like once designers get the hang making visual designs, the majority of their time gets chewed up on this kind of mundane work. What version, what variant, where is that file I was just using yesterday, of the hundreds of layers I now have in this one file, where did I put that little leaf pattern I made a week ago.  Someone help!

[R C-R]

I think you are never going to get a 'one size fits all' answer for this because there are too many different workflows & kinds of projects for that to be meaningful.

So if you can tell us more about the kinds of projects you want to do it would help narrow down the possibilities.

[henryanthony]

@mpstaton Hi! I struggle with file management issues all the time and I am just a single person working on personal projects. Here are a few file management house keeping tips that I have found helpful. 

• A programmer I once worked with told me to never develop a file hierarchy deeper than four levels. This works for me.
• Figure out file naming conventions and stick to it. All caps, upper and lowercase, all lower case, initial cap only. Word spaces, words separated by hyphens or em dashes or periods (.). I never liked words separated by periods (.). 
• If you have several versions of the same file, add a numbered suffix to the file name such as:
  • Drawing 001, Drawing 002, etc. Do not name like Drawing 1, Drawing 2, etc. because you will run into sorting problems past 9 versions.
• Think about setting up folder templates for various types of projects if applicable to your work. Then you can copy these and add to or delete from as needed.

[mpstaton]

@R C-R hey there.  Before I answer your question, I want to wrap it in a theory. While there are no one size fits all anything, there are frameworks, patterns, templates, etc that emerge and inform what you might call "consensus best practice."  If you're a n00b, or like me you juggle a lot of different types of work  (I'm a CEO, so I spend a month on brand and then I have to go spend a month on finance....), you don't have the opportunity to develop your own elegant systems. You just want to copy what works from someone who's smart and put a lot of thought into it. 

As for the project I'm doing, TBH I'm just coming up with a pattern language for communicating the core ideas that are required to lead remote teams. This is not what my company does, but it is what my company has needed. I have written enough long documents and given enough presentations and had enough meetings to know that there's something missing in conveying meaning in the context of remote work. So, I am primarily building an Icon library that has symbolic icons for common patterns in conveying meaning. I'm then taking that Icon library and building standard, responsive components that can be used in documents, presentations, infinite collaborative whiteboards. I came up with a little term for this -- Convey-UI. It's based on a theory of action I've been cooking called Visual Leadership. 

I will post some of it here later, kinda working against a self-imposed deadline right now.