Thoughts on Design

What did I name that? How many times have you asked yourself that? I know I’ve been there more than I care to think about.

The way to get out of this rut is using intuitive naming. In both my graphic design and my web design work I’ve taken to being very careful about naming files. I have come up with simple file naming and storage location rules that make sense to me, and I follow them carefully. There are a lot of ways to do this, but the important part of me is that it has to be intuitive. Even if I can’t remember a project, it takes just a little bit of information about it, and I should know where the file is stored, and what it’s called.

The same methods can be used for the HTML coding. I’ve recently been spending a lot of time doing HTML 508 compliance work on long and complex documents. This results in dozens of HTML pages with hundreds of figures, each with linked ALT Text, complex graphs and tables linked to pertinent information, multiple tables of contents, references, and appendices. The trick to keeping this all organized is coming up with a simple naming structure which allows the designer to always know what an anchor or link needs to be, without looking up the other half of the equation each time. The image for Figure 1 is figure-1.jpg, which links to the anchor alt-figure-1, which links back to the original. The same theme continues with chapter and section heading links, tables and graphs. Each name can be predicted by it’s purpose. It allows for the complete job to be done sequentially, rather than having to keep all of the files open at once to match links and anchors.

So can you remember what that file is called? Was the file name and location intuitive? It should be.