Organizing Your Embroidery Designs - On A Budget!


by Dan Wyszynski - Date: 2007-01-14 - Word Count: 554 Share This!

While there are many software packages out there that will help you organize and catalog your items (whether it be designs, images, music, etc.), many, if not most, are costly, confusing and yet-another-thing to learn.

Today I want to tackle the task of organizing your designs on the cheap. We will just use the standard Windows file system (though this can be readily done on a Mac). I am going to talk about methods of organizing, not any OS-specific functionality, so this can be readily applied to any type of file on any system.

So the first thing we need to analyze is what kind of designs we have, and what would be our best strategy for beginning to organize them. With that in mind, we need to figure out how many ways we can categorize them. Off the top of my head, I can think of a few possibilities right away:

Few or same designers (One/Few particular company(ies) or your own)

Many designers

Design collections

Genre or sub-type of designs (animals, flowers, etc.)

Size of designs (We should make a mental note about these, since changing the size by more than 20% degrades the quality of the design, and from my experience, thats even pushing it).


Organize

Let's see if we can create some possible structures for the examples above.

Let's take the first case of having just a few different designers, or you digitize your own designs. If we are sure that the amount of designers is going to stay static and you will not be growing the number of different design suppliers, then it would make sense to start thinking about what kind of designs you have.

If you have a specific target audience, lets say you do baby clothing or pet items, then your categories could be limited to Boy/Girl/Pet type, Seasons, Holidays, etc. One thing to keep in mind as we start subdividing the categories is that you can get pretty granular, but there's a point of diminishing returns. What we want is the ability to think, "OK, I need a bib design for a baby girl that has a cute Christmas saying" and be able to know exactly where in your computer it resides.

So let's start building our catalog. We have, as examples, the following starting directories:

[top-level]/Baby Designs/Boy/Holidays/Christmas

[top-level]/Baby Designs/Boy/Holidays/Thanksgiving

[top-level]/Baby Designs/Boy/Holidays/New Year

[top-level]/Baby Designs/Girl/Holidays/Christmas

[top-level]/Baby Designs/Girl/Holidays/Thanksgiving

[top-level]/Baby Designs/Girl/Holidays/New Year

Notice how we structured based off the gender. If your business is less reactive (on-demand), then a variation of the above could be more beneficial to you:

[top-level]/Baby Designs/Holidays/Christmas/Boy

[top-level]/Baby Designs/Holidays/Christmas/Girl

[top-level]/Baby Designs/Holidays/Thanksgiving/Boy

[top-level]/Baby Designs/Holidays/Thanksgiving/Girl

[top-level]/Baby Designs/Holidays/New Year/Boy

[top-level]/Baby Designs/Holidays/New Year/Girl

The choice of how to subdivide the categories is very important, and can only be done after analyzing your own personal needs.

If our business is not as targeted, and we use many different sources of designs, then we have a different situation. What we need todo is, once again, look at our customer base and the type of work we're asked to do.

[top-level]/Designer 1/Holidays/...

[top-level]/Designer 1/Animals/...

[top-level]/Designer 1/Flowers/...

Again, this is subject to how you work. We could just as well do the following:

[top-level]/Holidays/Designer 1/...

[top-level]/Animals/Designer 1/...

[top-level]/Flowers/Designer 1/...

Putting it all together, we could have the following structures:

[top-level]/Baby/Bibs/Bunnies

[top-level]/Baby/Bibs/Bears

[top-level]/Baby/Bibs/Flowers

[top-level]/Bags/Fleur De Lis

[top-level]/Bags/Lace

[top-level]/Shirts/Holidays/Christmas

[top-level]/Shirts/Holidays/Halloween

[top-level]/Shirts/Holidays/Thanksgiving

[top-level]/Socks/Holidays/Christmas/Snowmen

[top-level]/Socks/Holidays/Christmas/Snowflakes

So there you have some suggestions on how to organize your designs, and keep things where you can find them.

Next column, I will build on this concept, and show you how you can tag the designs you own for easy searching.


Related Tags: budget, organize, designs, embroidery, embroidery designs

Dan Wyszynski

Any comments you may have, please contact me at dan@embuniverse.com or through the website at: EMBUniverse.com.

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