Have you ever realized JUST how much time you’ve wasted SEARCHING files, images, logos or other project assets? That every project ends up in a Where’s Waldo searchathon?

Join the Angry Designers tomorrow as they cover the not-so exciting topic of file management! In this episode, the gents strive to make File Management Sexy! Well…one can only hope…but it’s a necessary discussion that needs to be addressed!

In this podcast episode, we will cover:
– Why this is important for Graphic designers
– Different types of storage
– Folder management
– Naming conventions
– How to avoid the need for a DAM
– Tips and tricks

Be it exciting, sexy, or just necessary, this episode will make you a little more boring, but also a little more organized!

 00:00
Word of note, never, ever under any circumstance, put those five letters F I N a L on a file. Okay. No matter, even if it's the version that goes to the printer, because it's going to come back and haunted, you will come back and be like, oh, by the way, there's something wrong with this file named final designer, where we cut through the industry to how frustrated graphic designers survive and thrive. What's up Johnny? Oh, wait, you've all been waiting to hear this for a little while. Ooh. Yes, yes. Oh, good gravy. That's awesome. Doesn't that felt good that we did it. We did. We I'm sure some could argue that we didn't, because we did start, we intentionally started three days early because we wanted to start on an artificial whiskey Friday. That's right. Yep. Yep. We just find, we did, like we did this short month, but 28 days is a month. 

 01:12
None. The less. And that's. That was just enough for me. It was just approved that we could actually pull this s**t off. Right? Like you almost have to give yourself all these little challenges over and over to say I'm. I am very happy because today I had some great really s****y experiences actually. I can just work myself a drink right now. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. So today's a nice Michener's bourbon. Thank you mentioned. Very nice. This, this great moment. Any kind of endorsements would be welcome. I'll call the Quincy bottles of wine. Just give us bottles. We're not praying for any money. Whatever gives us, more liquid courage, that's fried cover topics that are really deep. That's exactly that will help the likes and the, and all the reviews. That's right. Speaking as fluid as we are more people like us. Speaking of this, though, what we would like to do, this is a legit thing. 

 02:15
We've been running with this now for a little over a year. We're having a great time. We're meeting people everywhere. In all fairness, we, it's a process to get your name out there, spread out, get kind of a broad note, your whole circle of everybody that we can reach. And, and I love everybody that we've reached. I, we have awesome conversations, but we want more, right. There's there's more that we can do. Right? You always, you always want more for the right reasons. Right? Exactly. In order for us to get in front of more people on podcasts, we need reviews. I don't think we ask for too much, however, what we're going to do, Sean. Okay. For the month of February, the month of March and the month of April. Oh, okay. We are going to give away three pairs of apple air, pod pros. 

 03:01
Okay. Woo. For anybody. Okay. It's going to be a condo. Anybody who actually gives us a review in February, right? You give us a review in February and then hit us up on Instagram and say, Hey, I dropped your view, expect this name. All right, we're going to give away every set every month. Again, if there's only a couple of people on it, your chances are going to be pretty damn good to actually get a set of these. However, hopefully that there'll be more of you giving us reviews. We are running eight, three month contest every month, just to reiterate every month we are going to be giving away a set of apple AirPods to people who are leaving us reviews on apple podcasts. What we're going to do is we're going to tally up for February. Yeah. February. We'll have a winter March. We'll have a winter. 

 03:44
Yep. April we'll have a winner. Okay. Every one of the next three months. This is going to be our leading into spring review promotion. Wow. That's okay. Right. So this was recommended to me. Yeah. From, you know, some of these experts. Again, when I started at Zed factor, I would go around to other agency owners and be like, Hey, help me understand how to become a better agency. Right. Almost none of them would hate me. Why would we help you? But it's a different world now. I have gone to other podcasters and I've been the K dudes, Hey dudettes, I love what you're doing. Let me know what can we do? And they're like, Hey, start with this. You've got a good fan base kit them up. Right. So this was recommended to us. So that is what we're doing. Please by all means, either pause this now and head on over or afterwards, head on over, and then hit us up on our Instagram, which is Instagram or forward slash angry designers podcast. 

 04:38
And up, please hit us up. We look forward to sending out the first ones. That will be really cool. Yeah. 

 04:43
You can listen to us in like super stereophonic sound every in the most with the best headphones around. Right? Just that those sexy voices. 

 04:52
Brain cavity game. Yo, we're going to give you, we're going to amp up your, graphic design persona. You're going to make you angry. Maybe that's not a good thing. Yeah. You can't be. 

 05:10
Mad with those things in. 

 05:11
Your house too happy because you got those. They are pretty bad ass. They do have a, I do have a pair and except sometimes they follow button. Mine are the old generation. On the gym, they'll follow I'm the guy who was chasing him. Apparently they fixed that with the new ones. And I do. I must admit they still sound f*****g incredible. Yes. The crazy thing is when you put on the noise canceling, I've never had noise canceling headphones. Hey, you never know. So these are my first ones. It was the craziest thing because in the summertime you'd mow the lawn and you can hear the lawnmower. It's just like, it's pointless to even have a sex. I was curious, I put it on and it was just eerie. I know this technology is, it is privy to many other companies, but I've never had anything like this. 

 05:56
As, as a drummer I've I have noise canceling headphones because you have to kind of have those things, but normally for the great big, do you remember the old seventies Really work, but they are not very sexy. 

 06:10
Looking and they're really heavy. 

 06:13
Issues, but that's very cool with the wireless aspect of it. That's, that's really good. And, and I've often worried about that. Cause if they fall out, like you said, they're under the f*****g treadmill or something like that, 

 06:28
Like doing the lawn and stuff. It never did. Just the gym when I'm jumping around, because I am that guy at the gym who jumps over with. 

 06:35
That's good. You're not that guy on the phone doing one slow. 

 06:42
Videotape yourself too. I know. Right. It's kind of bad. All the craziest things. All right. What are we here to talk about today, buddy? 

 06:52
I think we should talk about, this is not a sexy topic. Fair enough. 

 06:57
Would you agree with no, I agree. It's non-sexy but it is damn important. It is. Which makes you a better designer, which is a damn sexy thing. Okay. So indirectly. 

 07:10
Pretty f*****g sex. That's what we do. Do what we do, make it fun. We make, we give you tips along the way and stuff like that. S**t. These are, these are things that we've kind of honed as we've gone along. It's it works really well for present factor. Yeah. 

 07:26
Yes it does. Yes, it does. All right. We are here to talk about the most exciting topic of file management, The horn it's adult topic, but the thing is people underestimate that, the better you get at this, the better your game is honestly like yes. Pre and okay. I was pretty fortunate the first 10 years struggled with this whole topic. Right. Again, it's and the word that we've, being in business for over 20 years, it's like, it was so different 20 years ago than it was 10 than it is now. We've had to keep evolving, but we've managed to carry along a lot of the same systems that have, once that system came in place at around year seven, eight, dude, it just, you didn't have to think about it anymore. And that's why this shit's important, right? Like the kind of storage you got to do you use a, a dam system or not digital asset management. 

 08:26
Dam system, a dam system. 

 08:29
I mean, and this stuff does make you better at what you do. It makes you perform better, right. Especially if you're in business, this is a hobby who cares, but we're talking about professional. 

 08:38
Use. Yes. If you're freelancing different. 

 08:41
Animal, maybe depending on how many customers you have. However, if you're freelancing for 10 years, Dan, this is true. These systems will help you like rocket. Right. I don't want to say systems. That sounds so formal, but does, but I think everybody does things a little differently, which is the scary thing. Right? It's like, there's no right or wrong answer. Right. What has worked for us should work for everybody in the f*****g world, but if it does, that's. 

 09:06
Okay. This is exactly. 

 09:07
Right. Because again, we're a little different, we have high volume. Yes, yes. Right. There's still lots that you can take away from this. 

 09:14
That's for sure. We have clients that are, that span numerous. 

 09:19
Absolutely. 

 09:19
Going back to 2017 for some of these guys. So. 

 09:23
No more our customers, we have over 3000 jobs in our backlog. The thing is we can find almost anything we need to in all of those 3000 as insane as that sounds. Yeah, it sounds boring, but it is, it has helped us and it's made it streamlined and it's helped make us, we are, we're a very efficient place very much. So I'd like to think, so. 

 09:43
You certainly have to be with the kind of volume that we're going through. So, you don't want to spend half your time looking for pieces of this job and then spend, 10 minutes finished finishing. It's so terrible. 

 09:58
With the stupid. Again, how frustrating is it when you're spending more time trying to find something for a project. I mean, that's happened to me before, it still happens. I think we're almost at about like a 90, 95%, which is good. Considering our volume. It doesn't happen all the time, but man, you guys hear me grumble when it's like, who the hell named this final three underscore ready, underscore print underscore RGB. And that s**t happens. 

 10:30
Totally, totally. It's usually either the hubris of a, my personal experience is like, okay, this is pretty much the final. I know it's going to be fine. As soon as I do that, I f****d myself. Dude, 

 10:42
It's a curse word of note. Never, ever under any circumstance, put those five letters F I N a L on a file, no matter. Even if it's the version that goes to the printer, because it's going to come back and we'll come back and be like, oh, by the way, there's something wrong with this file named final. You can. 

 11:05
Exactly. David's. 

 11:08
I know, right? Like it's like a curse and I know everybody feels this, but it's true. Like the efficiency of an organization really is based and bigger, small. I mean, we've worked with big and small and you've seen complete disorganization and the big yep. Right. And like streamlined, like awesome. Like awesome. On the small, on the smoke. Right. The question is you've got to get it from small to big. You have to actually make that s**t scale. Yep. 

 11:31
Yes, exactly. Yeah. Difficult to do. With the steps of that, we're going to lay out for. Yeah. It's pretty straightforward. I think absolutely rocket surgery or anything like that. You know what I mean? 

 11:41
No, no, I don't think so. I don't think so. So, well, the first thing we're going to do. Okay. First and foremost, before we even talk about the boring stuff. Okay. We're just going to quickly review the different, basically three different ways that you store files. Right. Right. Again, not on our, over the exciting and I'm sure you might even have heard some of these if not already know them, but basically there's three different ways. Right. You've got external hard drives, right. Or local storage. Yep. Then you've got local networks. Yeah. And then you've got clouds, right. Cloud, cloud internet, basically think of it that way. Right? Yes. So, and the funny thing is whether you're big or small, I mean, this company is all kinds of, or back in the old days and they still have tapes, believe it or not organizations would do tapes. 

 12:24
Yes. It would be on a network and they would do tape. Again, these systems, these are the basic three breakdown of these, but there is so many different versions of this there's hybrid systems that do local area in cloud backup or local end tapes end cloud. We're just talking to the basic three because most of the people that, we're dealing with are either freelancers or small agency owners. Right. So, what, we're not talking about enterprise level stuff at this, but however, we can talk about how our customers handled their systems at enterprise. And it's not always great. It's not always right. First off, external hard drives, external story. Right. Lacy hard drive, what I mean? Like, well, and it's funny. Right? It's so true. Okay. So, I mean, you've got all these brands and basically this is, you're working on your computer, you're saving stuff on your computer and you back it up on an external hard drive because it's like a backup, right. 

 13:17
It's a second set of system right now. This goes back for God knows how long, like, over the years. Okay. I guess you can say long time ago, people would use floppy disks. Right. Over the years, went to something called a zip drive, which was a floppy disc with a hundred megabytes of storage when that was big too. That was, that was huge. It was cool to have, like, I'll just give you all my zip drive. Right. It's a quad. It was Iomega zip drive. Those are actually really, and they were durable kind of cool. You can throw those up against the road. Yeah. I mean, that kind of ended up going to these hard drives and these hard drives just got bigger and bigger. The hard drives all vary from, like your typical hard drive to like even the solid state ones right now. 

 14:00
Right. That are pretty intense. That's for sure. I know that a lot of laptops have these, but I guess the idea here of course is to keep everything on your laptop and then make a backup store copy on an external drive. Right. Which is good. Hopefully if you can remember. Yeah. The good things about doing something like this of course is they're fast as hell. Yeah. Because the connection's right there, it's right there. Right. Easy to access anything you want, because number one, if something's on your computer itself, your access is instant. Even if it's on a backup, you just got to plug it in and just find it. So accessibility is great, right? Yes. The nice thing about doing this is no matter where you are, as long as you have your laptop with you're never going to forget your stuff because it's always there. 

 14:39
This is always there, right? There's a big convenience factor for doing this. And again, people are guilty. Designers are guilty for saving s**t on their desktop. Right. Even here in our environment, we'll have people really quick to just say something, your desktop, like drag it from the web, download it, put it in. Right. As opposed to going through the whole rigamarole. Right. 

 14:58
Creating the folders. 

 15:00
Yeah. It does come back to bite you because then what happens? Right. They store it, they set it up. When one of us has to go grab it and it's like, s**t, you stuff's missing. Where is it? Whose desktop is it? All right. So that's what it means. It doesn't always happen is 95% of the time. What we do in these cases is we actually make them take their shoes off and run around the outside of the building in the middle of winter. Let me tell you, oh yeah, they don't actually get too often after that. Right. They. 

 15:27
Come back, I've ruined so many socks. 

 15:30
You're lucky that you're allowed to wear socks. The bads of course on this though, if you forget, like sometimes you only have one backup copy. Right? Heaven forbid something happens to your computer if it's not up to date. That backup copy is not up to date. You're, you're screwed. Right. So that's a big, bad, unfortunately, right. 

 15:50
With thumbdrives too. There's a lot of storage space on. 

 15:54
Some of those same concept. Right. But they're. 

 15:55
Easy to lose. 

 15:58
They are. Keep in mind, there are a lot slower too. And there's lower. Yeah. Are right. We're a lot of the other, a lot of our external hard drives. I mean, they're great speeds. Right? Crazy, crazy. I've had thumb drives corrupt on me. I've had them go through the wash. 

 16:15
Yeah. That's not, that's not recommended. That's a last ditch. What did they call that? It was like a, it used to be is a Sneakernet. You're going from one computer and you save your file onto somebody or onto this thing. You give it to your buddy or your teammate sneaker net. Run it over to. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we used to do that in the old days. 

 16:38
Oh my God. I don't even want to know what you want to share in those old days guys. We'll just leave that to the imagination playing. Exactly. 

 16:44
Exactly. Music, music. Yeah. That's what it was. That's. 

 16:46
What it was. The other option that we talked about, so that's local stores that you can consider that local, not even right. That's like your hard drives. That's hard drives external hard drives. That's that's as close to your computers, you're going to get, depending on the size of the agency or, the size of your operation, then you have, a LAN, a local area network. Right. Right. What this is this when basically everybody's connected to the same network, right? There's a server that server, holds everything, stores, everything, right? You, you hear this in all kinds of small businesses. This is where the idea of the tape drive comes in. Right now, these networks can get huge. Right? You can get so many of you can get hundreds of people, thousands of people on these networks and organizations. Right. Problem is after a while. Okay. Wait, wait. 

 17:29
Well, I'll tell you worry about the problem. Needless to say, in theory, the local area and it works great. It works for some people, Hey, we've got two doors down from us. We've got another agency who specializes in local stuff and they do have a local area network. Oh, right. They absolutely do. So it does work. Right? Yeah. The advantage is of course everybody's network to one another. It's easy to share between each other. Right. Speed. It is fast. Right. Cause you don't really in theory, need the internet for this. Cause your networks to one another. Right. You just need to have power to those damn things. Cause the local area network, it's not reliant on the internet per se. Right. Revision controlled is generally pretty good. Cause there's software involved that actually helps us write the ads to this bads, to this of course. 

 18:15
Right. Number one, it's expensive as f**k. Right? It is. Cause you need to pay for the setup, pay for the equipment, the switches, the routers, the servers. Right. Which you still want to back up. Right. It's expensive then they're not easy to manage. You need to professionally like it companies, that's all they do. They specialize in that. That sounds expensive, dude. It is expensive. And it's like, anytime, there's a problem. It's like, where are you going to call Ghostbusters? You're not helping you in this situation. Right? No, but I mean, seriously, it's, I've seen this man is just such a pain and then there's the security risk, right? Because often if you want to work from home, you have to somehow log into your network. Generally that's going to be firewalled and that's not easy to access often they'll have to clear your IP address. 

 19:04
What if you're on holidays or you go to a cottage or something like that, it just, it's just a nightmare in my opinion. Right? Yeah. Very, very problematic. No wires everywhere. Oh no. It's just like a nightmare right space. Right. This would take up a lot of space. Most places have a server room or server closet just for this. Yeah. It's a nightmare. So unfortunately, yeah. That's, that's another option works for some, maybe not for others, right? If you're just a smaller organization, you definitely don't have to worry about this. However, I must say I have met a couple of freelancers that have created their own local area networks inside their homes. They do, they have external hard drives external servers and this way it's kind of not sure why, but maybe it's an interest, a hobby. I don't know. There's some benefits on this one for sure. 

 19:47
Yeah. I just, this is something that was way over my head growing up and I did everything in my power to avoid this, to the point. Even when were starting, we used to just run around zip drives to every computer I'm working on this. Here it is. He's dude, we had like a whole like 20, 30 zip drives. Went from zip drives to CD rom. That was when s**t got real. It was like from a hundred megabytes, you got 600 of them right on neither is this a local area? Networks is a second option. Yeah. Right. Nowadays we've got the cloud, right. The cloud, everybody hears about the cloud and we're so used to this and in theory, the cloud sounds great. Not, it's not always, what's chocked up to be. Yes. Right? Like the nice things about the cloud, you've got backup logs, easy for history. 

 20:34
You can access this s**t anywhere where you've got an internet connection, which is nice, right. With the right securities follows you everywhere. Right. And, and sharing with internally or even with customers is so flipping easy. 

 20:46
Yes. That that's really nice. Very handy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 

 20:50
That's unfortunately you need the internet to access anything. Granted some stuff we'll sync it on your desktop. When you get to internet, it'll let you transfer it over. The problem there of course is you have to actually get that piece of soft so you can create something and let it sink. If you need to actually access something, you're kind of Sol. 

 21:10
Yeah. Unless you were working on it on your desktop at the time of whatever the internet outage. Yes, 

 21:16
Absolutely. It is. It is challenging because not everybody has equal access to the internet. This is something that so many people take for granted. Yes, absolutely. That's true. Right. Again, it's you wouldn't believe how many people don't have enough or they have slow internet access because you're an absolute yeah. Your files are dependent 100% on your speed. Yeah. Some of the files that we deal with earn the gigs. Yeah. 

 21:37
There's a lot. Can you imagine, I know. Like I would take a f*****g day. 

 21:42
These files. Yeah. No. You kind of wanna avoid that kind of stuff. Right. So, and of course, the more you save on these, of course, then it is going to be more costly as well. Right. You're always going to where, if you have a local drive, you buy it, you have it, usually you combine them in 2, 3, 4 terabytes mash. That's going to last you for years. Right. It's like, we're in cloud, you're always getting it upgraded. There's also the whole idea about, getting hacked. Yep. Right. Which is a huge scare, huge fear. Right. Or even having ransomware come on there where they hold your system and they demand money. Like, I mean, that shit's real. It happens. I know people that it's happened to. Right. So it's a scary thing. That's for sure. I mean the most popular cloud, servers that everybody knows about everybody hears Dropbox, right? 

 22:29
Yeah. That's a big one that's popular, in Dropbox has some really cool features from like history to that smart sinking feature is awesome. The nice thing about Dropbox is it offers a free version. Right. It usually gives people a ton of space. They do a ton of stuff on, right? Yeah. The best thing about Dropbox is it literally looks like a folder on your desktop. You don't have to go and click off and do a log in or anything like this. You can open up a desktop folder on your desktop or a shortcut and your sidebar menu, which I have. It takes you there as though it's on your computer. Best thing about beautiful. 

 23:08
There's some clients that I don't touch. Yeah. They're on there. If I have to, like, if I have to somebody's sick or not there and I have to go there, click on it, sync it. Everything's easy. You just go to the folder that you want it eventually sinks for you. It's so brilliant. When I'm done with that, just unclick it. 

 23:28
It hides again until you need them in like six months, 

 23:32
No storage taken up on the computer. 

 23:34
Absolutely. Yes. All right. Love it. There are other systems like Google has a ton, right? Google's got Google drive. Yup. 

 23:42
However, I think it sucks. Yeah. It's not very good. 

 23:44
It's not right. Like it gives you a ton of free space. Yes. Man, like they don't make it easy to find stuff. Right. It's certainly not for a company that's that stresses on everything's about user experience and, get your webpages faster as a we'll reward you and do this and user experience that like, yeah, this is a really s****y system. 

 24:04
It really is. And, and I have to think that they're probably got somebody out there working on fixing this. 

 24:10
I don't know, dude. Cause it's been like this for years. Really? Yeah. Like it's cool. That it's big. Today actually the first time was actually pretty quick for me first time in a long time I downloaded something. Somebody sent it, but like, I mean we have some stuff on Google drive. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I mean we do nothing, no jobs wise, but then try to sort that s**t out. It's impossible. It's not very intuitive. Easy to find it. Yes. You think it would be considering it's Google. Yeah, exactly. 

 24:36
And I don't know. Maybe the, like I said, everything I have is just all blah, blah. I just plopped on in the window. You know what I mean? Like there's no, I haven't figured out a way to, I know, 

 24:46
I think that there would be something more in tuned, more graphic user, a better graphic user interface. It makes things more visual. Exactly. Yeah. It does not. I feel like it lacks right there. I wouldn't recommend that cloud option totally does box is another one that it seems like some of our enterprise customers use. 

 25:02
Oh, do they? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I think it's designed for that. Isn't it? 

 25:06
It like I said, I think that's the strength for box of course, is that it's bigger and I know that the privacy it's got a lot more tiers of privacy really helps. It's so secure. It's collaborative, which most of them are. I mean, again, I haven't had the few times I've tried to get into. 

 25:20
Box. I didn't like it. It. 

 25:22
Wasn't a big fan. It wasn't as easy as I was hoping it would be right. Okay. One drive. I'm not a Microsoft person. Nope. The problems that I get with that when customers try to send me something on speaks wonders of the horrifying, awful experience. If somebody out there has good experience with one drive, please tell us, let us know, trying to figure this. 

 25:43
S**t out would just be interesting. Yeah. 

 25:46
I cloud for apple is another option. Yes. Can you actually use that, like in this kind of environment, like, 

 25:52
Can you, I don't know whether you can or not like that just. 

 25:56
For photos. 

 25:57
I think it's a very personal kind of style. 

 25:59
Yeah. It's still cloud, it's still saving stuff to the cloud. 

 26:03
I would assume that you could save whatever the hell you want. If you wanted to save a document or a, like a Photoshop file that you're working on or something like that. I imagine you could probably do that. Right. It's fair to seem kind of weird, but yeah, 

 26:17
Know it does seem a little. 

 26:18
Bit. I would, apple seems, it seems more of the fun kind of. 

 26:25
Inline with, iCloud is also creative cloud. They're offering cloud services as well, which is kind of, I don't know if I would trust Adobe with that. 

 26:33
It's interesting. I've used it a couple of times and it's very interesting because you can, you send a link to somebody or somebody send you a link to the files, you correct. Those files, save it. And then that person has got those. It's kind of cool. There's no, there's no file folders, but the problem with that is like, you don't have a copy of that in your files. So can later on grab. 

 26:59
It or you're almost limited to keeping it all there. 

 27:00
And I think so. Yeah. It just seems like you didn't want to have it on your own in some format that, what I mean? That works for you. Yes. It works for you or yeah. I think that's a big collaborative kind of idea. 

 27:14
The collaboration I can sound key. Yeah. I don't think for long-term storage asset management, I wouldn't necessarily recommend that there's, P cloud or course is very secure, enhanced privacy settings and sync is really secure. It is a lot of the people that I know a lot of the network professionals that I know they are always recommending sync. Really. Yeah. Yeah. It's not the issues why we're not on sync is because it was an intuitive enough when were, we tried it, we tried to transfer over a big chunk of files to it. It was an intuitive, it was corrupting all the files because the naming nomenclature was different. 

 27:57
Glacier, needless. 

 27:58
To say, I heard it's a good system and the support was trying as hard as they could to help. When you've got already 10, 15, 20 years where the backups done a certain way, challenging to move that forward, 

 28:10
Are they a small company or is it like an. 

 28:12
Online news new world? I think we tried it a few years back. They were only in the business second year or something like that. Yeah. So new. 

 28:18
Work maybe possibly. 

 28:20
Yeah. Fix their game at the time. I felt it was more for a PC user, not a Mac user. Then, the mindset, the way we use things. That's how I felt I could be wrong. Okay. Even the support when they were helping, they're like, yeah, you did this on a Mac. Yeah. I get it. And so there was some issues. So fair enough. Yeah. There was some challenges, but now for what we use. Yeah. Right. Yes. So, with all these awesome, we've got a studio, we've got several employees, we've got the space, we've we need fast file trim. We're working on giant systems. I think most people would be surprised to know that we're actually on Dropbox, 

 29:00
Dropbox. 

 29:01
We okay. We seriously, and this was crazy so reason. Okay. Reason being, so years ago we had a land and we had a local area network. We had this setup, the hard drive actually corrupt. We lost a ton of s**t. Okay. We went to the backup was deprecated H he was literally when I needed stuff, it wasn't there. So the backup was f****d up. Yeah. It was, we literally, some mess up, we had a hardware failure and then we had a second kind of hardware failure, which freaked me the hell out. So went from that to CD ROMs. Right. So were constantly burning CD-ROMs right. And were going crazy. All of a sudden we started having hundreds of these. Right. Which was insane. CD CD rums are great, easy to access you just one spot, but you have to find which disc it was through the discs. 

 29:56
The nice thing is they wouldn't corrupt. Right. Once this burned down there wouldn't corrupt. At the same time, then it became like crazy version control because you'd create a project last year. All of a sudden client had revisions this year. Now you've got a second version of, so we then needed a better option. I was either forced to go back to a local area network, maybe a hybrid or the cloud. I remember Dropbox was something new, always hearing. I'm like, dude, this is the future. Right. Let's start using this the way it's meant to be. Right. At this point we already had our organizational system in place. We had our structure, we knew what our naming was going to be our naming nomenclature. It was an easy transition for us to do it. Right. Okay. So now we're in an office. Okay. We're networked in the sense that there is a whole network here, but we don't use it. 

 30:44
Right. Oh, right. Do you, have you ever actually pulled anything off the network? Not at all. You're using the network to just get the internet. We have, we have great speed here. We have fiber internet here. We're getting pretty decent speed, but not nearly as good as some people out there. Cause we're only getting a consistent 50 Mbps. Right. We're getting not, we have clients who are delivering, a gigabit of gig of internet speed. We only got 50, but because it's 50 up 50 down, it's symmetrical. Right. It's more than enough for us to get what we need to when we need to. Okay. In our office of, almost 3000 square feet, half the people actually use wifi to connect to Dropbox and then the other half plugin and get speed directly. Right. Yeah. We haven't set up in such a way and we've got our naming methods that we can easily search anything we want on Dropbox. 

 31:37
We can find what we need to, we can view stuff because it has that smart sync option where, yeah, you can see the little thumbnail on the image you're looking for. Right. It picks up there. So it's an amazing system. The reason why we've made it work is because we've been organized with the rest of our system. Otherwise we would be looking at like a dam, right. A digital asset management. Man, once you get into that shit's expensive. Right. It makes it easier to find stuff, but you can completely avoid going down that road if you actually have a system in place, which we do. Yeah. Right. Yeah. The key with Dropbox and I mean, everybody always scares you with security. Okay. You need to make sure that you have a Loctite password. Right. That's the thing, not this password 1, 2, 3, or not, my kitty, Fred, like you have to actually step your game up. 

 32:30
Right. For us, we stepped it up and we actually got one password, which is a password protection system. Right. Right. That's where all of us, all of our stuff's in there. Right. It's, that makes that Dropbox password pretty damn big. I mean, it's thick, it's like 32 characters long your case lowercase. I mean again, when something happens to one password. 

 32:52
And then we're done, then we're. 

 32:54
Done. The reality is, if you have a lock tight passwords and you don't share that password and we don't because certainly you only access it through one, but you don't even know what your password is. 

 33:05
I have no idea what it is. It's just a bunch of, it's just a 32 lines of died. 

 33:09
Right. And, and top it off, Dropbox also has this you'd think that were sponsored by them or something, honestly it is so f*****g. 

 33:18
Yes. I totally agree. Okay. Considering working on box when we did that, I did not like that. I thought that was very confusing and Dropbox, it doesn't, it's not perfect. I wish cause some of these things, some of these dams that I've seen pretty cool. They're really good to get the tags, ? Like, so you could tag stuff. It's like, I don't know whether does box Dropbox do that. I believe it. 

 33:42
Does. It's just, we don't use it. Yeah. Or Dropbox. Yeah. I believe it does. Oh dude. There's so much more does. That's awesome. Much more, but on a good note, it searches. As long as when we keep our naming in order, we're totally safe. That's, that's the key. Right. And that's how it's worked for us. So, well, don't forget. It also has this two factor authentication. Sorry. I'm going back to security. Anytime anybody logs in new that it doesn't recognize. Yeah. It sends me a message saying, Hey, are you going to let this person? If you are give them this code, otherwise they don't get. 

 34:14
In. You don't get in. Yeah, exactly. 

 34:16
So, I mean, it's scary as hell to think that like our whole business is on the cloud, but at the same time it has made us so efficient, easy to access everything that we need to. Right. Like, I mean, I think it's just, I mean, to me, I don't know. I've recommended it to our neighbors because again, they were on a local area network and she was struggling with password issues and authentication because during lockdown COVID lockdown, they were having issues with people working from home, not being able to access everything else, dude. How, how much did we have to prepare for when this happened? 

 34:48
He was, it was seamless. 

 34:51
It really was. Right. Again, that's the challenge and that's I think huge in this game, you have to remember, what's it gonna take to actually get to that space? And for us it was nothing. Yeah. Yeah, so it works, but it definitely works. It works even better for us because we have a pretty damn good system because the system in place. That's the second part of this podcast. Right. We're going to talk about the system that we use, our ideas, our methodology or naming blah-blah-blah right. I know it's not very exciting. This is the second half. That's not very exciting, but there is some sexy parts. Yes. Being like this. All right. Thank you for this way. Okay. The sexy part about having a cool organizational system is you are going to be efficient as hell. Right? That's pretty sexy. But think about it. Like once you have a system in place and where everything is, you don't spend any unnecessary time looking for that shifts. 

 35:50
How like, that's like, sadly, most of my t-shirts are black, but I don't have to stress in the morning. Like what t-shirt am I going to wear? I'm just like which black one. That's almost the only decision I have to make. Sometimes I've left the house without underwear, because I've had two or three different choices. I just said, forget it. It's too late. Your t-shirts I'm limited. No, but to being what it's efficient, it's like a, set it and forget it. Yeah, exactly. And that's key. Right? People underestimate it. Like the value in that number two, there's no question. It's going to make you a better designer. I know people are like, how the hell is it a system like this going to make you a better designer. The truth of the matter is every time you are, what's it like taken away from a creative project because you have to start looking for something and you're searching and all of a sudden something that you should have been able to go grab to complete this. 

 36:47
What you're working on right now has taken you 10, 20, 15, a hundred minutes, whatever the hell you want to go. Yep. It's frustrating as hell it is. It takes your mind off of the creativity. It puts it in a new mindset and your creativity suffers. Right. You're restarting that project. You might as well give up, like at that point and just start again first, the next day or something. So it's true. I mean, in that sense, so that's sexy. Okay. That, that's the sexy thing about organism really. 

 37:11
Sexy. Yes. 

 37:12
I agree. Okay. This part is actually kind of sexy. It makes you look more professional and bad-ass to your customers. This. 

 37:19
Is exactly it. 

 37:20
Right? Seriously. Like, I mean, we know what it's like when you share stuff or you get stuff and it's just like, it's a mess and you're sorting through it or they're like, they ask you for a file and it takes you two weeks to get it back to them. Like, it's really frustrating for them because they need it for something, they needed it yesterday. It takes you another week to find it. You're aggravated. They're aggravated. Yep. Dude, like how awesome is it when somebody asks us? Yeah. Can you send me this version of this logo? I don't have it handy. Yeah. I'm at the cottage, but I need this. Can you hook me up, dude? 

 37:50
How fast does it take us together? Exactly. And that's the thing just today. Somebody was asking for like a piece from a website that has to do creative. It's like, I didn't do that, but because of our f*****g awesome naming system, I can work my way back to where that live, where it came from and exactly. I know exactly where it's going to live within this. 

 38:10
So you. 

 38:11
Didn't create it. I didn't create. 

 38:14
Exactly. So and I mean, good luck. Damn damn. 

 38:19
That's right. That's right. Yeah, this is a simple way of doing things. Absolutely. To help alleviate that kind of crap that you're searching for stuff. I did this and it didn't even skip a beat. I still working on another project, found this, send. 

 38:35
It back, clients, multi hand guy, 

 38:39
Easy peasy, baby. 

 38:41
Time management, obviously it took you a second to do so. Your time management goes through the roof. Yep. Big time, big time. What the coolest part about having an organization system like this, you got mad respect from other designers. Think about it. How many times when you start getting to this, you're organizing layers, you're organizing files and then you have to share it with somebody else. Even though you may never ever meet that person, they're going to be like, oh yeah, we got to get this s**t from Zed factor. It's another agency. It comes, it's named, it's like, dummy-proof the layers in Photoshop are named properly. Dude. That's mad respect. They can't ever okay. Come back and be like, those guys are ambulance. They got game. Yo, 

 39:25
How many times have we heard that? Client's going, God damn your fault. Your files are beautiful. Right. 

 39:32
It's like somebody actually at one of our customers actually hit me up last week. He's like, I'm usually embarrassed to share my Photoshop files, speak to designers because they're really bad. Nothing's layered. Nothing's, everything's layered. Nothing's named properly. And it's like, don't worry. We won't judge. But secretly we do. 

 39:48
Secretly. We do exactly. But we're all like, we're like c**k. Sure. Yeah. Oh yeah. You want, our Photoshop is like, whoa, that's so true. Yeah. I have no problem sharing any Photoshop files that we've created here because they are gorgeous. But yeah. And, and that goes exactly the same way we naming our files. Absolutely. Right. And all this. 

 40:13
Absolutely. The fact that we're so proud of it, like Photoshop layer, docs and stuff. We're real nerds, but designed, but it's just like, wow, I'm really proud by sharing that. Just. 

 40:29
Wow. I know. Right. Some people probably sitting there going, what the f**k? Yeah. Trust me. Somebody else is going to look at this stuff there. They will care. Yeah. Right. Right. 

 40:41
All right. So, oh, so that's, those are the reasons why you need to get this s**t. That's what makes you bad ass my opinion. Anyway. Let's talk about our structure and then we're gonna wrap this s**t up. This nice easy one, right? Yeah. He's busy. So we always break it up. You get into our file system and it always starts off with the company, which is the name folder, right? Yep. And it's either corporate or customers. Okay. Okay. Yeah. For you, the answers, small agencies, corporate folder holds everything. We won't get into detail with this one, but this is where you have your invoices. You have your statement of works or contracts and NDAs, right. Your legal, this is where you have your own branded material, right. This is all under corporate. It's not sexy. You can make it sexy inside there. I mean, corporate, you just put all that stuff completely in a separate area because that has to do with the company. 

 41:31
I mean our corporate and the top it off in this seat, nothing personal Sean, but like nobody else has access to the, 

 41:38
This was when I was putting this together, I was like, I didn't even know there was a corporate folder. 

 41:44
I know. Right. Very few have seen it, 

 41:47
But that's great. Yeah. That is true. Yeah. There's, that's a perfect, because this is also part of this Zackly. 

 41:54
This whole everything's in the cloud corporate, that's completely, that's on an as needed basis. To be honest, you don't even really need any right. So nothing personal, but yeah. I don't think that's just going to make you excited cause you're not really helping with that kind of, 

 42:09
I'm going to assume though, that he's organized because you did it. 

 42:14
And organized. 

 42:17
I've not seen this everybody, but I know it's probably organized as f**k, 

 42:22
You've got the second of course, which is the customer's folder. Right. This has everything for every single one of your customers first in this mega high level folder customers. Again, you get in there, if you're an owner or a freelancer, you've got corporate, you've got customers done. Okay. In that customers, that's basically has everything broken down by our customers. Right. Has their jobs in there. It has their brand material in there. You could even put in some of their competitor information in that folder. Right. So, and again, if you think of some of ours, I mean, some of those are pretty big. Right. And they're pretty layered of course. Right. We do in there, you've got your customer's folders and that breaks down everything for your customers. That's, this is where s**t gets real for us. Right. Because again, we have, if you look in our folder, we've got like a hundred plus customers in there and you can find everything you need to find for them. 

 43:14
Yep. On a good note, if you have Dropbox, you can turn on and off the customers that are active. Yes. Which is important. Cause sometimes you get customers, you only deal with once or twice a year. You don't delete them. Yeah. You just get rid of them. So they're not active. Yeah. Right. It doesn't act like it's on your desktop. Yes. What we start off with all of our customers. High level folders. Yeah. Right. This is a hierarchy, sorry, not a hierarchy. Nested folders. They're all necessary. Yes. Obviously the first, once you open up your customer's folder, you see a list of all your customers in our case, in alphabetical order. Yep. Right. It's easy. It's logical. Don't even worry about it. You can find shortcuts to those customers after the fact, your computer create aliases and such. In this case we just list all of them in there. 

 43:59
Yeah. Right. Yeah. There's like no rocket science here. Right. Easy peasy. All right. The next is when we generally have two sub folders inside of every customer. Right. We always start off with the brand folder. Okay. Asterix brand. From there we have every customer project folder underneath there. Okay. Yep. Before we get too much in depth here, I is really important to kind of understand the naming convention we use for these, because I think that's what has saved us all these years for everything. Right. First off the job folders underneath are often customized for the jobs themselves. Video jobs have different kinds of sub folder system. Right. Graphic jobs do web jobs. Definitely do. Right? Yeah. They have a different file system underneath so that we're not going to worry about too much. They follow a similar flow, but most importantly, we have to remember what the naming convention is that we use that has worked for us all these years. 

 44:58
Yep. Right. Yep. Obviously we always start off first letters. Yep. First three letters of the client is the, is like an abbreviation of the client. Right. Whether it's ABC or factor it's Z F a if it's, Cisco it's C I S yeah. The customers, first three letters or an abbreviation of the customer's name is always how we start, every single project. Right? Yep. It's the job number. Right. Okay. This is how we are able to keep, not just hundreds, but thousands of projects organized on annual basis. Last year, we had one customer with 972. Okay. 72 individual projects. And we kept all that. I know one year, right. Again. It's, so we've never had to break that. I don't know what's going on. I've never seen that 1 0, 0, 0. We always start off with C I S dash and then the job number. 

 46:01
Yep. The reason why we always do the job numbers in three digits. Okay. Is, cause if you use, one or two digits, when you start getting into the doubles, that teens and stuff, then it completely messes up the order. Right. You can go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. As soon as you go 11, then it bounces up and shows up after the number one. Right. It goes 1, 1, 1, and then 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 1, 1, 3, 1, 1. So it completely messes up. So we all it totally does. We always do this out of a hundred. So 0 0 1 0, 0 2. We work our way that way. Okay. Make every single one, your projects, three digits. Oh, sorry. Starting at 1 31, 101 0 1. Yes. Would be your first or one zero will be first. 

 46:43
Yes. 1 0, 1, 1 0, 2 ones that works, right? Yes. Then so-so okay. We're safe. First three digits of the customer, second three digits are the job number. Okay. We write down the type of job it is. We have a small short list in abbreviation. Oh, absolutely. Keep it short. Keep it short three digits. If it's a graphic design project of any sort it's GRA yeah. If it's something brand related, it's BRD, right. If it's PowerPoint, which we certainly get a lot of here, a lot of those, but again, PPT. Right? We have web of course, web video vid. But again, these abbreviations help you. When you have to search for stuff and narrow the list down you across this network doing this will help you find what you need without having to actually go to a damn. Yeah. Right. Exactly. So then we've got that. 

 47:36
Right. We end up to the next, which is the title of the project, which we actually then try to keep three, four words if possible. Yes. Right? Yup. 

 47:44
Keywords, keywords, right. Something inside of the heading or if it's, like, I don't know, some kind of a ad or something like that. If you're looking for, cause a lot of times the clients will send, Hey you did, we did this last year for you guys. We got new artwork with one update. You want to kind of pull all that stuff so you can search for whatever the title is exactly. 

 48:08
Right now. The funny thing is, so one weird wonky thing that we've learned works for us in this system, if we have to transfer, right. We use underscores in between each one of the abbreviations. Okay. Dashes in between like the sentences or the words. In this case, if it's a job number, right. It's also the name of the project, which is like NISC dash trade show dash booth dash graphics. Yes. Right. Those are dashes. And then it goes under score. Right. A job number for us works something like this in this case. It's, the customer CIS dash 105. Yep. Then we go underscore yep. Job type. In this case, we'll say TRD for trade show, treasure underscore. Yep. We have the name of the project. Right. Which is trade show dash booth dash graphic dash 2002 or 2020 to. 

 49:10
20 years. 

 49:13
Totally true. That's what works for us in that case. Right. Because then it allows us to find that folder, you just looking at it, you have exactly an idea of, the folder, the number that how far it is in the chain and what it is. Yeah. 

 49:27
Got a trade show, booth our TRD on there. We know exactly if that's what the outline of the job is trade show booth then. Well, okay. I'm I need to know where the other trade show before. 

 49:38
Absolutely. Right. The only other messy part is sometimes after that part, we might have the bumping year, depending on if it's something more. 

 49:47
Regular and if there was a lot of versions of it, right. 

 49:50
Well it goes with it goes year after year. You're absolutely right. Absolutely. Right. That's how we do our sub folders, and again, sounds tricky, but by doing it this way, we've developed a system that allows us to search our Dropbox for anything that we need to, and that's key on this one. Right. And it has prevented that between that. What Dropbox allows you to do, where to find everything we need, like really quickly Dropbox, 

 50:15
This is pretty awesome. It is really cool. It's really cool. It's certainly haven't had any kind of difficulty with it at all. 

 50:23
No, no. The searching function when, what search when you, what to search for and that's the key, consistency is key. When what it is you have to search for. 

 50:32
Yes. Right. Now I'm a little old school that I don't know what everybody else is. Like when you're like, I like the finder options still. I'm not, I'm not a big fan of the online style, like looking through the, 

 50:43
And that's why Dropbox is great. You can use the apple finder. Right. You don't have to log into. 

 50:50
Right. It's like old school guys like me. I can, I still love my finder. I like going through there. Yeah. Yeah. I think for the most part, the kids use the online version here. 

 51:02
I think some of them until they figure out this finder version and then it changes their life. It really does. Now that's our naming for all the client folders. Right. All the project folders for the customer. That's our name folder, the outside folder right inside. We're going to just quickly touch on that one. Right. I mean, the idea of course, is that, they're all on, like the project folders are all named exactly the same. Yes. It's just the folder breakdown internally might cater differently, based on the project. Right. All of our sub folders start off with first and foremost, our read me folder. Okay. There's a sub folder inside of here called read me. This is where we put job description. This is where we put anything that we can think of on the job. There's an email that we want to share with, that we had with the customer. 

 51:50
Anything that can just help outline what the customer ask is, goes in the read me file. Yes. Right? Yep. Do I need to say anything more about that? That's pretty straight school Mac right there. Read me. That's where it came from. Exactly. Number two, collateral. We have a second folder here called collateral. This is anything that the client gave us that we need to complete the job. Yep. Okay. This isn't working folder stuff, but this is like, oh, Hey, we have all these images from a photo shoot collateral. Hey, we've got these docs that have to go there collateral, Hey, here's a PowerPoint that can help you with this color. All this s**t goes in the collateral. So, when you have to find anything for this job that the client has given you go to the. 

 52:30
Exactly. Right. And that's a great spot. You leave everything in there. You don't f**k with it. You don't save over top of anything like that. You always got clients reference to hold off or in case you need it, the client. 

 52:43
Collateral folder. I shouldn't, I think we've shortened the collateral, but you're right. 

 52:47
Basically. Yeah. He's just like, do not touch anything. That's just stuff to draw from right. 

 52:52
Now, from here down is where things change. Right? In this case, if this is a graphics job, we have a working folder, right? This is where you have all your versions of InDesign, PowerPoint, whatever it is you have in this working folder, within that working folder, you might have a separate images folder that contains both raw and, Photoshop and everything. Right. This is where you have all your versions of what you're working on. That is live current working s**t in that. 

 53:20
That's right with the job title, name that it's at the top. 

 53:24
Folder was, and that's key, right? Everything stays named the same. Yes. Always starts the exact same way. It sounds like a pain in the ass guys, but it's just, it takes nothing. Once you're used to this job, the number, what it is. In that description, Photoshop layer file of that, or not even Photoshop, but like, add design one, BC or this. Everything's still keeps that naming system going. That all lives in your working folder. That includes all the different versions that you are working on. Yes. Right, exactly. Then we've got a proofs folder. You finish something in working, you drop a copy of it in proofs, but not the layered, not the working. Nope. This is what you share with the customer. Right. Again, trust me, keep that naming convention when you share it with the customer again, how many times is this saved us? 

 54:16
When we're looking for a job for our customer, we're looking for our previous email. You're like, s**t. It was for a job, right? Yeah. You type in that job number sent to Scott or Jim or Bob. Right. The list of all your conversations of that project starts because you started the email subject line with that job. Literally all it is the job number in that case, just the D the CIS dash 105. Semi-colon, here's your question. Know your subject line, the customers appreciate it. It helps us so much in this case. Right. So, and again, proofs, right? Like the proofs are that way, right? Like the job number proof, number one. And then the date nutcase. Right. All under scurred with dashes in between. Like, again, it just keeps everything organized in that case. Right. We got the proofs revision requests are in there. Yeah. 

 55:08
Yeah. So revision request is underneath proofs. So again, this happens a lot. You got a customer, you give them a proof. They give you revisions. Yeah. You drop the revisions in revision requests. You don't work on it in there. No, but this just keeps a copy somewhere of now, this could be an email. This could be a word, doc. This could be a marked up PowerPoint or a PDF or PowerPoint, whatever. Right. Keep a copy of every single one. Let me tell you why there's been so many times when customers forget what kind of, proofs that they give you or what kind of revisions they give you. They will correct themselves and overwrite the, and contradict themselves. If you don't keep a record of that s**t, right? Like, again, our business is a big cover your ass. If you don't keep a record of that, they're going to, they can easily say, dude, like I told you to do that. 

 55:56
And it's like, no, here's your email. You clearly said, do this. You clearly said do that. Yeah. Anything revisions regarding revisions, always keep a copy in this folder. Even if it's an email, just a PDF that email, throw it in there, drop it in there. It's always good to draw from that. Yeah, absolutely. Right. Yep. And then last but not least final. Wow. What can we say? This is a. 

 56:22
Funny, but it's very important. You need the, 

 56:26
You do need to be not often for the, what you're going to present to the customer, sadly, but you do in the sense, because once they've approved proof, number six, then you drop your final. Right. You don't put the words final on anything. That's horrible. 

 56:40
Don't ever. 

 56:41
Put that date. Yeah. If it's print ready, you put print. Ready? If it's slide ready. Right. You actually list what it is. Date is the key on that one. Right? You make sure you put down that date. There it is because how many times I'll be like, oh s**t. After his final. Oh, we just caught one more thing. Oh, it happens all the time. We'll never use those words. 

 57:00
Generally when you find something in the final folder, that was the one that was used and whatever. So it's always perfect. If you go into the working folder and there's, four or five variations in there or versions, I should say, and then you go into the final folder, that's probably, that was the one that, 

 57:17
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, some of our sub folders, very like if it's a web folder, we've got a different format. We always have the read me. We always have the collateral, but in this case we may have sitemap. Wireframes creative, you know? Then, revision priests, the, also our. 

 57:33
Video, one completely. 

 57:35
Different one. So they all vary a little bit. The, ideally they all the same principles, the same. They always start with read me. They always, continue on with collateral. Of course, what you collect is what's in between. That seems to just kind of evolve from project to project. Exactly what this system has worked for us for so long. 

 57:53
This is absolutely perfect. Combined, you combine this with Dropbox and we don't really need necessarily a damn no too. So you could save cash on. 

 58:04
Those are expensive. They're really expensive with the right naming system. You don't need it. It. 

 58:10
Kind of works. We've kind of hacked the system. 

 58:13
We totally hack the system. Hack the system there, hack the system with Dropbox. 

 58:17
Yeah. So it's all good. Yeah. This is, yeah. This is a really great effective system that we've used. This is when did this come out? When did we start using this 2000? 

 58:29
It's two, no ice. Okay. This has been like, this has been years in the works. This has been, even before we lost everything from our email system. Oh my God. When we lost those emails, that was one of the reasons why went to a cloud-based system. Because again, we used to have a local system. We were using outlook crashed three years worth of emails, and that's where we kept everything like contracts in this dude. We got so screwed over that's when it was just like, Nope, everything's going in the cloud. I'm betting everything on the cloud. 

 58:57
Cloud. I do. Thank God. Gigi's. 

 58:59
Again, remember some things to remember always, okay. Things to note, which are really important, save every single change as a separate file. I don't mean like, oh, the customer has changed. Number one, save it. I mean, let's be honest, revision, change something big customer, sends in an email. Here's a change. Save it as a separate file because what you never, ever delete or overwrite an old version of something. Because then on this I know, right. What happens if they're like, oh s**t, I don't like this. Let's go back to what you just did. Yeah. And you don't have it. Cedar bone. That's a huge rookie mistake, dude. Huge rookie mistake. Big time. Big. Right? Always, always use dates type in dates. Don't rely on the system date. Cause often you'll be like, oh yeah, this system data. I can just like do a get info. 

 59:45
It'll tell me the date it was created. Exactly. Dude, that is never act dicey because it throws, when it's open, modified didn't know, always type in a date, always, and never, ever name anything final. Cause you are forbidden to name anything final. Just don't bring. 

 01:00:04
That kind of hurt down on you. 

 01:00:08
The second you name something final, be prepared to have a final B a final C. Damn. I thought this was done. A final seed. Damn. I thought this was done. F M L kill me. Like it's true. It's. Dude. It's gross. Right? Always use lowercase letters in filed naming systems. Okay. This would have prevented that whole when we want it to move over to sync at the time. Oh yeah. Always go lowercase. Make it a good rule of thumb. If you have to. Always use underscores instead of spaces, always in between like all the projects, if you can write and never any spaces, the key is sorry, underscore or dashes just don't ever leave a blank space. Right. Right. Because blank spaces are replaced with code. If you upload your cloud system often. Right. And that's again, what happened with sync? Unfortunately it started putting all these characters. 

 01:01:03
Then there goes our search system. That's why we couldn't use it because now we couldn't find anything because all of a sudden it was like adding an extra characters to fill the blank. 

 01:01:12
It's like an ampersand or something like that. Yes, totally. And that would f**k everything. Oh, I see. That's interesting. Okay, cool. 

 01:01:19
Jeez. Yeah. I mean, it works, this system works for us. I'm sorry. It's the most full and check on our website. We will be putting a blog post on this. Right. We can actually put something on there that you guys can follow actually look at for yourselves and kind of get an idea. Yeah. The idea, honestly, that what we're trying to prevent is, don't be haphazard. Don't just kind of name things. Cause it's convenient to just slap something in place and you will lose it. You'll forget. If you don't have a system you don't know consistently what to look for. That's key. That's what the whole point of this episode is going to be about. Or Isabel is to kind of create a system that you can keep consistently. The time comes to go search for something, you can easily pull that bad boy up big time. 

 01:02:01
Absolutely. So much better, so much better. You'll watch. You'll thank yourself later on, because certainly if you have any kind of long-term client base, like you said, we've got clients that are in the three thousands. Absolutely. Quite often I'm drawing into the 20 eights for stuff. You know what I mean? So yeah, exactly. If you're going to want to know just what that stuff, and I can say somebody be like, when was this done? I was like, oh I can, I know what this exactly where this lives. 

 01:02:31
Totally. 

 01:02:32
And it's just handy. It's so handy down. 

 01:02:35
You'll be thinking is what you're saving yourself. Thousands of dollars and tons of aggravation hours. 

 01:02:40
Just, and you're creating that's the important part is you're not looking for shifts. You're spending time because you've done the backend stuff. You don't have to worry about that. Sweet create CRI. 

 01:02:53
Well, I think that's almost wraps this dad was. 

 01:02:56
Pretty good player. It was kind of boring, but he was awesome. I know it's I made him maybe boring for, to kind of a topic, but I think we, it's still exciting to me, like this is part of the magic of this, right? Like as, 

 01:03:12
So, so let me just throw this out. If, if any of you actually made it this late, when you hit us up on Instagram, because you were awesome and actually left us an awesome review, but down something about this episode and we'll actually give you a second vote. Okay. Our secret, our secret second vote, do this and you'll increase your chances on getting that those air because I'm curious for may, you guys are bad-ass if you made it, this that's. 

 01:03:40
Exactly good for you. Good for you. 

 01:03:44
All right. I think that almost wraps us up, buddy. 

 01:03:46
Yeah, I think that was. 

 01:03:47
Good. I hope you guys, you found some useful stuff or even just on keeping yourselves organized by all means, guys, please leave us that review hit us up on her Instagram, follow us like us, send us a message. Cause we're reviewing, we're commenting with everybody. Okay. By all means. Share us with your friends and yeah. I hope if you have any other great ideas in the future, drop us a line and let us know what you want to cover. Totally. 

 01:04:09
Love to hear you guys. 

 01:04:10
Absolutely. It is awesome. We've got a quick punch. Yes. All right, everybody. My name is Masimo. My name is Sean. Stay creative and Stang.