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The Greatest Design Tip Ever?
Yes. Keeping your fingers hovering over Command-S (on Mac) for saving your design work has saved my own work from being lost many times. But is this the greatest design tip ever?
I think so. What about you?
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10 Comments
I think it might well be, it’s almost ingrained into me like a 30 second habit, its very important. You can always undo!
13 Dec 2010 04:12 am Gareth Coxon
Best tip ever is…
Don’t open an original document from a previous project with the INTENT of saving it to a new file for your current project and accidently Ctrl-S out of habit and save over the original.
I er, know this guy… that does that all the time…
13 Dec 2010 10:12 am Andrew Keir
Don’t do it nearly enough, end up getting carried away while I’m working, can’t tell you how many times I freeze and lose an hour’s worth of work.
My other tip is make sure you work from the start in high enough res in photoshop and name those layers. Picking up files that don’t satisfy either of these drives me mad.
13 Dec 2010 01:12 pm Rob
Gareth → Yeah, same here! Its either every 30 seconds, or every important step.
Andrew → Oh, you know a guy, eh? We’ve all done it. A few times I’ve done the worst thing and saved a PSD file after flattening the layers, only to have the client wanting amendments to the file.
I used to use Adobe Version Cue, but it never worked out for me. Now, I save PSDs as different versions which uses loads of HD space, but it’s worth having backups.
No wonder my BackBlaze online storage backup is 450 Gig, lol.
13 Dec 2010 02:12 pm Andrew Kelsall
Indeed, it’s easy for backups to get out of control.
I specify in my working agreement that I only keep the workups/drafts etc. for 6 months after project completion before reserving the right to discard them. After that I only keep the final artwork source files permanently.
I typically save in fairly regular increments through projects, which eats a lot of storage. You do the same from the sounds of things. Too much to backup if you keep it all IMO.
14 Dec 2010 03:12 am Andrew Keir
Andrew → Sounds good, although if you have enough HD space, there’s no real need to delete anything important I reckon. Even though I use 450 GB, I have 1.5 Terabyte of space…
14 Dec 2010 07:12 pm Andrew Kelsall
Rob → Oh yeah, naming layers is a must. This is something I do for the most part, and colour them, too!
Thanks for commenting…
14 Dec 2010 07:12 pm Andrew Kelsall
True,
I have a 300gb hdd I use for backup, and I just delete the oldest materials when it gets full and I need to add something more recent.
I do end up keeping stuff for more than 6 months typically, it’s just a little aid to stop it getting crazy in the future.
14 Dec 2010 08:12 pm Andrew Keir
It definitely is but its one 90% of us don’t do enough, and can all surely count numerous times where our work has disappeared due to various errors and use profanities to curse ourselves for neglecting a simple keyboard press
22 Dec 2010 10:12 am Stephen Dyson
2nd greatest tip:
Spell check.
Nothing worse than countless dollars lost because someone can’t bother to double-check their spelling.
18 Jan 2011 07:01 am Montana
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