Comments on: Folder Structure and Project Organization Best Practices

By: Greg - Antifreeze Design

Greg - Antifreeze Design — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 21:15:46 +0000

Thanks for the OCD. Some good ideas there. I also don’t have a real need for CVS yet, so I’ve created a (mac only) Automator app that I keep right inside my top folder. It takes the name of the folder (“SRC” in this case) and adds the date_time to the front, so all I have to do is click it, and it makes an alphabetized back-up right there. Slick and easy.

e.g.:
20100104_48391_SRC
20100107_34502_SRC
bak_StormFlash/SRC.app

By: Organize your workflow for design production – nina mehta

Organize your workflow for design production – nina mehta — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 02:36:50 +0000

[...] Other structures Developing a Sensible Folder Structure Folder Structure and Project Organization Best Practices [...]

By: Damir

Damir — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 10:20:46 +0000

Awesome post! Helped cure many headaches later on…

By: Jay

Jay — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 12:17:01 +0000

@Haakon

Sorry if that was confusing – by “save out” I simply meant duplicate (or copy and paste). In this system you never do “Save as…”. You just work with the original file the entire time and then copy and paste whenever you want to make backups. Copy and pasting literally takes 2 seconds so it’s not very labor intensive.

If you have a project that will have lots of text files then by all means create a “Text” folder in your “Assets” folder. Every project is different and will have different folder requirements.

-Jay

By: Haakon

Haakon — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 10:49:41 +0000

It just strikes me as beeing a laboury-way of organizing, having to “save out files” (and then resaving the file back to original name (save as: file_01.ext, and to continue working and saving having to save as: file.ext again…) and also having to
copy out folders (create and copy files and folders…)
also I’m missing file sorting to a bigger extent than Design and Deploy.. what about if sorting photoshop files from text documents etc..?
I’m working on projects that easily count over 1000 files (not system generated) and
i’m just not sure if this organization will solve the sturcture issue for our projects…
however it pleases me to see different ways of tackling this issue!

By: mk2

mk2 — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 03:16:23 +0000

Well, nice to know that I’m not the only one who’s obsessive compulsive.

By: stanley Wood

stanley Wood — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 22:06:40 +0000

Brilliant.

Was just working out this same thing when I thought I’d see if someone else had been stressing out the same problem.

Thanks a lot for this;)

By: Jay

Jay — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:29:07 +0000

@Keith

It’s funny I used to use a “swf” folder but I ended up getting rid of it. I really should use one since I do mostly Flash work. I ran into lots of problems though passing off files to clients and not having the SWFs in the root directory would mess them up sometimes. It still makes sense to use it for some projects but for most of the work I do having a separate folder just ends making things more complicated for the person I pass it off to.

-Jay

By: Keith

Keith — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 12:34:24 +0000

ha, good stuff. you’re def OCD like me – i have a very similar set-up with a few naming variations. you do a few things differently that i really like though and i have the feeling they will work their way into future projects. also, i find it amusing that there’s no ‘swf’ folder.

By: Jay

Jay — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 13:48:26 +0000

@John

Yeah I’ve seen others use a “lib” folder – I might consider doing that. For folders/files that will end up on the web (and my src and deploy folders since it seems to be the standard) I always use all lowercase but for other folders I like to use a starting capital just cos I think it looks nicer and matches the default system folders.