X3 Studios Blog

Organizing, naming and sorting files in an accessible manner for all the employees of a media agency, optimizes time spent on a project, minimizing badly used time for finding the final approved concept, resources or project documentation. After many unfortunate attempts to (re)reorganize the files and folders of a project, we finally arrived to a conclusion, vital for our current situation as a company.

Complicated or efficient ?

Establishing a convention regarding folders and files naming, as well as a coherent folder structure has the following advantages:

• A folder structure based on a specific and logical description, eliminating personal interpretation .
• Time spent on finding the resources, documentation is optimized .
• The chaos of the “latest version” is finally eliminated. Words like FINAL, NEW, LATEST, OLD will not be found in the folder and file structure anymore .

Folder structure

Each client will be assigned a unique ID, and the following level of folders will contain all the needed information for that client’s projects.

Project type and file naming

Project Type	Description
ANIM	Animation project
APP	Desktop Application, Mobile Phones Application or PDA
CAMP	Campaign (a campaign is considered a separate project that has further multiple projects itself: PRINT, WWW, etc)
CG	Computer Generated (3D, Motion Graphics)
DB	Database project
DVD, CD	Multimedia project
KIT	Installation Kit
PRINT	Any type of project that will be printed
TPL	Templates
WWW	Websites

One of the most difficult situations when starting work on a project that already exists, and on which several other people worked, is that you don’t know what the latest approved version is. You have a deadline which you can’t sometimes respect because you are losing time looking for the source file.

Starting with this scenario in mind, we arrived to the conclusion that each source file (ex: model_totem_v04_OB) should contain the following information in its name:

• Name of the source ( model_totem)
• Final version (v04)
• Name of the person who worked on the latest version(OB - Ovidiu Bejan)

We can only wish that this folder structure “version” is a starting point, to be used whenever we get started on a new project.