At every office I’ve worked there has been the scourge of bad file naming. It’s caused countless problems and even heated discussions (we designers are so emo!). I’ve heard out other people’s naming systems and just found them riddled with problems. When we founded Objective Subject, we cracked this nut. I thought I’d share, if anyone out there is suffering the same problems.

Goals

The user base of a naming system is both the creator and the outsider. A good naming system should satisfy the following requirements:

• Be legible and transparent to the outsider
• Make the creator’s life easier
• Work in current conditions and those within the foreseeable future
• Enable order and hierarchy
• Extend beyond a particular file format or workflow

Solution

[Client] [Filename] [YYYYMMDD] [EDITOR'S INITIALS] [A-Z].[ext]

That should result in something like this:

DeOrchis Web Presentation 2 20100906 ADC A.ai

Hopefully it reads without explanation, but it came from a long and reasoned brainstorm, and you deserve the whys and wherefores.

Explanation

Title Case:
All upper and all lower are nice dogmas but title case is more readable and helps scanning (in a vertical column the greater width variation between upper and lower makes it more obvious when a series of files ends and another begins). Anyway, clients will have names where title case matters (MoFo, Objective Subject, whatever), and this will look better.

Spaces:
You may have learned file naming way back when you couldn’t use spaces or special characters. Don’t worry, it’s ok. We can DO that now. It’s much faster to type a filename this way. Just let it flow!

Client name:
If the file is ever misplaced or is searched, this is crucial. it’s place in the name is semantic (Weil ID Sketches makes more sense than ID Sketches Weil) and makes for cleaner/more scannable directories.

Filename:
This is pretty flexible. Make it make sense. When appropriate, start with the phase of the project (ID vs Web, for instance) and then Sketches, Presentation, Brainstorm, Slide, whatever. Make it descriptive and don’t be afraid of too many words. There is no limit, but be reasonable, it will get truncated first when the column is too narrow.

Date:
“This is a weird way to date things”, you might think to yourself. Well, it’s computery. And it’s also ordered most sensibly. Those that follow DDMMYY or, worse still, MMDDYY will end up with their newest files mixed in randomly with their oldest, as months and years jump up and down. Suckers that went with that format in the 90’s are paying for it now.

Our dating system will work until January 1, 10,000AD. I don’t plan on caring about my file organization by then. Your newest files will come after your first, when sorted by file name in ascending order. Nice and neat, less worrying about the weird mac finder date modified setting only showing up in list mode.

For my fellow nerds: it’s called ISO 8601.

Editor’s initials:
We wanna know who did what. When we swap files, it’s important that the origin is in tact and, ideally, when we do that, my file and your file will have identical names except for the initials. That way nobody overwrites someone else’s stuff, and we know who did what. Three initials avoids conflict in 99% of cases (scientifically proven).

When you adopt someone else’s file, keep the original, duplicated it, and change the initials to your own once you modify it. It’s easy when it’s near the end of the file name, and again, everything will be nice and chronological.

A-Z for iterations:
What? Alpha? Yeah, alpha. I figure, if you’re diligent about saving versions of a file to avoid losing the good stuff, you’re gonna do that more than once in a day. And you won’t change your name that day. So you need a versioning method. 0-9 gives you 10 versions in a day. 00-99 gives you 100. If you save 100 versions in a day, you’re spending too much time in the save-as dialog! A-Z gives you just one thing to edit when saving a new file—save as, right arrow, backspace, B—and you’re versioned. It also gives you 26 versions in a day. That’s a few versions per hour. Isn’t that enough?

Notes

Extension:
You can avoid using the extension, but I figure don’t hide it, it’s auto anyway, and it helps when not on a mac (like on an iphone or something, not a damned PC) to see what’s what.

Directories:

The one thing not built into a filename is the directory in which it sits. I encourage everyone to have a folder for each client, and a sub folder for each project or phase. These should be in your Documents folder, not your desktop.

Linked files:

Some project types, like web and InDesign, are a matter of organizing and versioning linked files. That means that renaming versioned files will result in broken links. My solution has been to only version deprecated files. That is, keep the most current file named as simply as possible (only the file name, no client, date, initials, etc). Before editing, or saving over that file, duplicate that which you are about to replace and give it a dated and versioned filename. Here you can add some descriptive text to give yourself a hint as to why that file is deprecated.

Git & SVN:

For serious group projects, and software development in particular, ignore me and use these. For design, however, I find these systems too invasive to a workflow and lacking necessary power to work across file types. They lack extensibility, access, and ease to work for me and for my office.