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JOB ORGANIZATION & BACKUP IN THE STUDIO

By Dennis Angelo, president, In House Graphic Design, Inc.

It’s easy to get busy and not take care to work in an organized way that protects your work for future reference and republishing. Time is money in this business. Take the time now to set up a system of storage and retrieval that will save you hours of frustration in the future. We started our business doing technical literature for a large corporation. The shelf life of each document we created was anywhere from two weeks to a couple of years. We are talking about thousands of documents. It was very important to be able to retrieve those documents and update them in a timely manner with confidence that you are working on the latest version of the document.

We did this with a simple job number system. Each client got a number: 10 for instance. To that we add a period and another number for that particular job: 10.1, 10.2 and so on. We add to that a short description that makes it more specific by describing the kind of work it is: ad campaign, capability brochure, website update. This is usually followed by a date. When you’re done your job number looks like this: 10.2 website update 09. Looking at that number we know who the client is and what iteration of the job it is, the product and the date. We file the work in folders by client number. The individual workstations and the server is then backed up using an automatic backup software. Give yourself plenty of space for storage. We now have two one-terabyte servers and that does not seem like a lot of space anymore.

It is not so important what your organization and backup system is but that you have one and follow it on a regular basis. In the 26 years we have been in business, I can remember two devastating system crashes that could have been a lot worse without an organized system.

Dennis has been a professional member of AIGA since 1991 and currently serves on the Upstate NY Chapter Board as Communications Chair.

Posted by newyorkupstate in Fodder  |  November 1, 2009