piksels

In response to one of my previous posts about bad file versioning.

Two weeks ago I wrote a post on the problems of file versioning, in which I cried out to Adobe:

“Dear Adobe,

I’m kind of sitting here online with a couple million designers, and we think you should fix this.

Love,
Designers”

And little did I know, Adobe was sitting right there listening to me. I unexpectedly received a kind email from the Adobe Product manager, curious to more insight on the topic and how it could be implemented into Adobe CS4.

I couldn’t help but feeling how such a large corporation suddenly felt human and tactile. I’m glad to see a how Adobe takes their time to read users opinions and comments, despite of their dominance in the market.

I figured if I would ever have any influence on Adobe’s upcoming software, it would be now that I’ve engaged into a dialog with their product manager. I have willingly been using Adobe’s software for as long as I can remember, but I still can’t get over many of its shortcomings, and I made sure to be clear about this.

At times like these I want to urge people to voice their opinions about the way we use applications opposed to how we wish we could use them, because they are listening. Technology has made it relatively seamless for us to communicate our ideas to large audiences, and what could now be more important in this 2.0 industry than the co-creation of the very software we will be using?

UPDATE: Read the follow up post ‘Adobe’s Listening‘

Every designer reading the title of this post will understand what I am talking about, because we’ve all been there once before.

For obvious reasons most things on the computer are organized using a certain structure, it is just makes sense that way. Bigger to smaller, first to last, newer to older, top to bottom, and so on. Computers usually do a great job at organizing linear data, but when humans become involved with this data it can easily and quickly become a mess.

Try, try, and try again we all seem to end up in this same situation every once and a while. Sure, sometimes we are better at in than other times, and sure we teach ourselves little tricks to help prevent it, but it seems to be a curse which follows us. Sometimes you need to make a simple change to the color of the logo, and 30 minutes later you find yourself with 5 new versions, 3 which you exported to JPG, 2 of which you had to change to RGB to upload to the website, etc. It’s a mess, and there should be an easier way. Sure it’s partially our fault, but I’d rather blame Adobe. Therefore, my open letter to Adobe:

“Dear Adobe,

I’m kind of sitting here online with a couple million designers, and we think you should fix this.

Love,
Designers”

My proposal:

Every project we work on should be a single master file. This master file will act as a container, in which every version, revision, edition, etc will be found.

Here is a basic version of what should be in the file

The project file should allow the user to open the file and view snapshots of each file revision, that way it will be easy for us to know which one to open, and to have a quick overview of all of the designs, version history, etc.

Similar to Adobe’s approach to PDFs, they should make an application (similar to Adobe Reader) to view these project files without having to purchase Adobe CS3 software, or even open it (darn loading times!).

Let’s call this Adobe ProjectReader, for now =)

ProjectReader would be a simplified yet extended version of Adobe Bridge. It should allow us to quickly browse through project files, compare them, and export files to necessary formats.

For example, I recently made a logo for a client, and upon delivery of the final version, I ended up sending him a plethora of files (AI, JPGs both large and small, both RGB and CMYK, TIFF, and PDFS), obviously they were neatly categorized in folders, and so on, but we should be able to overcome problems like these with a simple application.

Imagine how convenient it would be, if you could send your client a single master which he then will be able to export to any necessary format, whether it be a .PDF for easy printing or a small RGB JPG for online use.

But it will take a while for my dream software, ProjectReader, to come out… until then, what are your tips for file naming?

UPDATE: Read the follow up post ‘Adobe’s Listening‘