Staying Organised When You're Disorganised

Keeping Your Illustrations In Order

I know I’ve spoken about this before, but I also know how much stress this causes when you’re not a naturally organised person (NOP). I’m a naturally disorganised person (NDP) like a lot of creatives, and I want to talk about how ‘out of sight, out of mind’ tendencies affect the ability to stay on top of things.

Some typical ‘out of sight, out of mind’ behaviours:

You buy a book and don’t put it on the bookshelf because you really want to read it, but don’t have time right now and you’ll forget about it if you put it away.

Your desk drawers are empty because everything that should be in them is on your desk in case you need it, but forget you have it.

Forgetting what colour you illustrated something in an earlier spread, and what the layout of the area is. And did you give the girl’s coat three buttons or four?

And I think I probably need to define what I mean by ‘staying on top of things.’

For me, that meant getting everything done on time with no impact on my deadlines or clients whatsoever. But behind the scenes was a different story. The constant back and forth with checking picture book texts, having to recheck page numbers, not querying things with the client because I’d left it too late, working on a small illustration to find I needed the exact same one but much larger later on (which meant a redraw, rather than just scaling it down if I’d worked in the right order). This was adding dead hours to my working day and causing stress I just didn’t need.

Once I changed the way I worked so that it suited the way that my brain works, everything became easier. And the way to that was to make sure I was utilising the tools I have to be able to see everything at once. At this point, I’m looking you Adobe Bridge.

[I can hear you all groaning from here.]

Visual Reference

I despised this program at first. RAM waster of a pointless thing. That was way back when Adobe Photoshop used to automatically show you thumbnails of psd files and I could see what I was doing when I opened a folder. The resentment I felt towards Adobe when they took that feature away was immense. I know you can download programs and apps to make this happen, but I don’t want to do that because viruses. I’ve been stung like that before. But Bridge is perfect for visual reference for workflow. I didn’t realise how much I needed it until I was working on a 6 book project recently featuring the same family, same house, same rooms, different angles. I was back and forth between previous files all day long. That would have taken forever if I had to keep opening these massive files to see different angles of the same room. Adobe Bridge just lays them all out there in front of you at the same time. And it’s bundled with Photoshop - if you have it, try it.

Another thing I did to stop the stress on this 6 book project was to draw flat floor plans marking off where doors, windows, and furniture are and store them in the a library. Then I can drag them in and rotate the floor plans to the same angle I’m looking at the scene from and know where everything sits. Big stress buster.

Workflow

Once upon a time, I worked on a mid-grade book that had 75 B&W illustrations. I printed out the clients pdf file which marked out where the illustrations were and worked from front to back, using this 100 page pdf as a guide. This was not the smart thing to do.

Once upon another time, I worked on a massive series of books and the AD gave me a similar pdf. She also gave me a spreadsheet with just the details that I needed to stay organised. I then colour coded that spreadsheet in order of complexity and marked off the order of work. This was the smart thing to do.

These big projects with huge amounts of references and client instruction were my nemesis. When I get briefs that don’t include a spreadsheet now, I accept that I’m going to spend the first day of the project working through the manuscript and making my own spreadsheet. It’s time well spent and will shave days off the project. It also allows you to see any queries that might arise at a glance.

Working smarter in this ‘at a glance’ way is the right way to go if you have those same ‘out of sight, out of mind’ tendencies like me and lots of other creatives - I suggest you give it a try if you struggle with the stress of staying organised. It will change your life.