Last month I visited a tiny print shop in Austin and it changed how I organize my layers

I was down in Austin for a weekend and popped into a small print shop called Southpaw Press. They had this old school way of naming their layers in Illustrator using just emojis and numbers. Like a pizza slice for the base layer and a sun for the top overlay. Honestly, it looked messy at first but the guy there showed me how they could find any element in under 3 seconds. I tried it on a project last week and saved like 15 minutes just on file navigation. Has anyone else used weird naming tricks like that in their workflow?

2 comments

2 Comments

luna_wells5711d ago

Started messing with a similar trick after seeing a buddy's desk at his woodshop. He labels his bins with little drawn symbols instead of writing out "screws" or "nails". A squiggly line for sandpaper, a zigzag for clamps. It looks like a toddler's drawing but he never grabs the wrong drawer. Makes me think we're all just looking for ways to cut through the noise. Like how I organize my phone apps by color instead of category because it's faster to find the red one for Spotify than to remember if it's under "music" or "entertainment". Your print shop trick proves it again. Sometimes the weirdest system sticks because your brain doesn't have to translate anything.

lucaslane10d ago

The color-coding for phone apps thing hits close to home. I do the same thing with my music playlists - got one called "blue" and one called "green" because that's the color of the album covers inside. It sounds dumb but my brain grabs the right one every time without thinking. That buddy of yours with the symbols on his bins sounds like he's onto something real. Sometimes the most basic systems work best because there's no extra step between seeing and doing.