Best Practices: Organizing Resources?

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Yuzuki
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Best Practices: Organizing Resources?

Post by Yuzuki »

Some months ago, my computer and backup drive were stolen. It sucked royally, I lost many treasured family pictures, backups from earlier version of my sites, and over 10 years of resource files such as brushes, patterns and textures. {Please save your cherished files and keep a backup at a different location! } But I must admit, I was a resource hoarder, I had so many brushes/pattern/textures that even looking through them was a chore. Also trying to remember where did i got the file from and the use policy for it.

Right now I'm left with a white canvas, a digital rebirth of sorts, and I would like to really keep things organized and simple this time around. For me the most problematic files are brushes and font.

Brushes: Do you organize them by topic (eg. all cloud brushes together), by author, or license (personal vs commercial use)?

Fonts: As with brushes, it was confusing for me when I had too many, I get annoyed when I can't find a font that matches the layout when I have thousands of beautiful fonts.

How do you guys keep your resources organized? Do you know of any program that can help with this tasks? Or are you a happy digital hoarder with a lot of patience that likes looking for the perfect brush?

Additional Info: Right now I use an oldie (late 2009) iMac with Adobe Creative Suite 5 Master Collection. So any programs compatible with that would be awesome!
dragoneyes
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Re: Best Practices: Organizing Resources?

Post by dragoneyes »

I don't usually organize fonts since I don't have that many, I tend to use the same fonts over and over once I like them. The only sorting they've is that they're organized by sites where I downloaded them so that I can easily re-find it and credit properly when I use them.

When it comes to brushes and patterns I first of all divide them by site (so one folder per site) like with then fonts, then I divide them again by theme.
For instance, my deviantArt brushes are currently divided in "Frames", "Hearts - Wings - Feather ornaments", "Lines and abstract ornaments", "Nature" and "Miscellaneous".
Since I only divide them by site, I usually make sure that the author is mentioned in the file name since I might need it for credit purposes.

Usually this is enough for me to find the brush/pattern I'm searching for. If nothing satisfies me I simply go searching for new brushes/patterns.
This dragon wishes you the best luck.
dubiousdisc
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Re: Best Practices: Organizing Resources?

Post by dubiousdisc »

I don't organize fonts and all the brushes I have are actually for painting, but I have an extensive gallery of textures that I needed to organize in one way or another. My way was to organize them by website, since this way they're already unified by having the same style going for them and it makes it easier to credit when needed, and then when possible in each folder I name them based on what they are - a filename would be something like paper01 or concrete13. This way I can also cross-search from the main directory for, say, paper textures by different creators.

I feel your pain about the hard drive. D: After the last crash of that type I invested in an external HD where I backup everything from time to time.
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Sofia
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Re: Best Practices: Organizing Resources?

Post by Sofia »

It sucks that your HD was stolen :/ Backing up is absolutely important, I'm currently trying to convince my mum that we should definitely buy a large HD to back up the files of all our computers because you can never know what might happen!

I tend to collect many resources so keeping them organised is my priority. I divide brushes in my Photoshop folder in subfolders named after their type (borders, icon, vector...) and make sure that each brush file includes the name of the maker to make crediting easy.

As for the fonts I follow almost the same model I have for brushes. All my fonts are in the same folder, but I can organise them in subfolders using Macintosh default Font Book program. Although I have quite a few fonts, I tend to know which fonts to test depending on the type of layout I'm making.

Textures/PSDs are divided first by size (icons vs. non-icons), then by maker. I am thinking of organising them in a different way, though. I'm thinking of either 1) sort by maker, but use tag to be able to search them by type 2) sort by type, but rename all the files to include the maker's name. We'll see :)
Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy.
Yuzuki
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Re: Best Practices: Organizing Resources?

Post by Yuzuki »

<Semi off-topic>
The problem is they stole both! The computer and the external backup. If they had only stolen my computer I would only be upset for a while, but taking the backup is the part that hurts me most about the whole thing. I'm also disappointed in myself for not having it encrypted, I should have known better. I hope they only deleted it and sold it. Nothing too bad in it (nudes or anything) but there where some personal and work documents with private info. The family pictures, I should have made copies and give to other family members to keep at their homes instead of being the guardian of them all. About that, I'm still looking through old DVDs trying to salvage what I can. After I'm done organizing those, I'm buying some 32 gigs or higher flash drives and give them out to members of my immediate family. </Semi off-topic>

Brushes
I think I'm gonna try borrow a bit of Sofia's approach since it seems to be the one that will help my workflow best. So I plan to place my brushes on 2 folders, depending on the license type: Commercial Use and Personal Use allowed. Inside those folders I will organize by type of brush (Stars, Grudge, Blood Splatter) and rename the brush to CategoryName_CreatorWebsite.abr. When I create a new layer using the brush I will name the layer with the Category - Author (so it will be easier to know which ones I used in the end when the PSD file has a lot of textures.

Folder Example: Personal Use > Stars > starfields_mary.com


Fonts
I have decided to go with the native mac option: FontBook. Been using it for a week, and I'm surprised how I never used it before. Its been really helpful for activating and deactivating fonts. Fonts are easier to credit since I can always look at the font layer and see the name and google the author, so I'm not gonna divide them by author.

In FontBook I'm gonna create two libraries (by license type) and create collections for each category of fonts.

Textures
Since I don't really download that many textures, I'll keep those organized by license type and then by author website.

Folders Example : Commercial Use > CreatorSite.com > texture.jpg


I'm very excited to try the following and grow by new collection in the years to come. If anyone else has suggestions I would love to hear them.
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Sofia
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Re: Best Practices: Organizing Resources?

Post by Sofia »

They stole both your computer and hard drive?!? That's even worse :(
I'm super paranoid about having my stuff stolen…even when I was in uni I only brought with me a 4gb hard drive.

FontBook is great! There are also other programs with more advanced functions to manage fonts on the Mac if you need them, but for what I have to do FontBook is more than enough.

Keeping all the resources organised requires a bit of work, but it's the only way to remember who to credit if you use many brushes/textures/fonts from different makers. I also tend to write down in a text document each resource I use on any new graphic I make to be sure I don't forget someone. Including the author's name in the layer works fine for textures (I usually do texture / texture name), but not for brushes since I generally use a bunch of them and brushes made by different people can end up in the same layer.
Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy.
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