the question of content management

My content is overwhelmingly digital: from blogs and articles, to essays and photos, to design projects of all kinds. This digital library can be difficult to manage: it’s hard to know what to keep and what should be let go. With so much storage, I need to have a solid organization format in place that will help my locate anything I need.

This is how I usually organize my content:

First: by subject. Usually this means work made for a certain company or class. This is the broadest category, because it’s the easiest for me to remember immediately when I need to find a particular file. For example, if I need to find one of the Reels I know I made for my current company, I’d simply go to the folder labelled with the company name.

Next: by project. Not every file needs to be sorted into a sub-file here, especially if there aren’t many files, but often I group files from a single project together to help keep bigger folders organized.

Last: by filename! File names are very important to file storage. They help organize files in a sub-folder, and help you search for them if you can’t find the folder they were grouped in. I have different naming conventions for different types of files.

For example, the summer newsletter I designed in 2023 had a long list of draft exports, all labeled some variation on “DWD Dignity Report 2023 v1.0.pdf”. This helped me figure out what my latest update had been, our most recent changes, and eliminated the trouble of using names like “draft” and “final” in a project that could easily be updated another 5 or 10 times after that.

I definitely have a tendency to keep my old files for too long. It’s hard to judge what you’re sure you’ll never need again! I like to at least have a backup of every project I have presented on a website or a profile, like my LinkedIn, and minimize unnecessary storage use by sticking to it.