File formats

The things to consider when preparing files are what is the purpose of the document, so what is it being used for? Is it a collaboration? So are multiple people going to need to open and work on it. This leads into what program is it going to be made in, this will depend on the outcome you want, is it a text only document or an image that will need using multiple ways, and this leads to accessing how  much information is in the document, for example can it be saved in a way that it loses information but takes less space because it is only being looked at or is it a logo for example that is going to be used in secondary ways to needs all its information in tact. I will go into file types and their best uses later in this post.

 

File naming convention. 

It is important to use clear and obvious file names as this make sit easier, some older computers will not be able to find them if they are not named properly, this also applies to the use of spaces in file names so always use an underscore instead. 

Versioning is a good clear and obvious way to name your documents so say I was working an a logo for a comply called Mouse a good way to save it might be Mouse_Logo_V1 and the next version as im working would than be Mouse_Logo_V2, if ding this is it also best not to use the word final in your name as the final is never the final and you do not want to end up with final_final as it will become confusing. 

You can add dates to documents file names but you the format  yy/mm/dd this make it easier to find later, this is because if you use the more conventional dd/mm/yy is harder for the computer so search and if say the date on the filename is 12/04/21 it may find you all the documents from 12/04 on many years. 

Do not use special characters  for example !@£$%^&* as the computer may see it as code, the only exception to this is the underscore as I have previously talked about. 

There is a naming convention called  CamelCase thas is also a good thing to get into the habit of using, an example of this is  Project_Auther_Date So the first letter of each word is capitalised thus making it easier to read as it stands up like the hump of a camel. 

There are multiple places to save your files and each is slightly different and has different pros and cons 

The first and most obvious palace, the desktop of your computer, is easy to find and is good for current projects but can easily become cluttered so it is best to move things to other places too. It is also not safe if your computer has any issues. This is also true if you save it to your computer's storage, it is more out the way there while still being accessible but is not safe from any hardware issues. Because of this it is always good to save externally whether it's the original document or a backup, places that can be done are on an external hard drive or usb  or in a cloud storage facility. External hard drives are good for being portable but you need to remember when setting it up they tend to be mac or pc specific so files cant be opened on both. A use bi very portable but it really only designs to be used as short term storage for a single project. Cloud storage is provided by lots of companies such as dropbox, you can also get it from apple or as part of your adobe plan. Storing things in the cloud makes it easy to share files with others and you can log into your account on multiple devices. THe downside can be that if you need a lot of space it can cost you and you always need an internet connection to access your files. 

 

Here is a screenshot of how I am organising my files for this course, is it currently on my desktop and there is a main file with each unit having its one file, from there I an adding my work and any other folders as needed, as you can see I added a screenshot folder here as I was taking quite a few and wanted to keep them separate. 

 

 

  

 

 

.JPG/.JPEG

These are very widely used and most often used for photographic images, there are various  reasons for this one is because you can adjust the degree of compression thus letting you decide what trade off of storage size and image quality you get. So depending on what you are using your image for you can decide if storage space or the quality of image are more important. An example is if your photo is going to be printed it will need to retain as much information as possible as you do not want a pixelated image but if it is just a small image in a blog post it can be much smaller. .JPG files can be opened on most computers and phones even if it is just in preview mode and they are saved from most image software programs. Some of the adobe design programs will not save as a .jpg as losing information is not their aim. 

.GIF

.GIF stands for graphics, interchange format and is very good for graphics. This is a lossless file size and although it has slightly been superseded by the .PNG it is still popular. This is because not only can it support transparencies it also supports animation making it very popular on social media sites like facebook. Gifs can be made in a number of apps designed specifically for this or they can be made in photoshop. 

.PDF

The pdf file is good for documents and is a lossy file. It is a good format for documents for a number of reasons, one is that you can embed images and text into one document. This is useful if you want a document to look a certain way, as no matter what program your work is opened in it will look the same. An example of why this is good is if you design a document with titles in a pretty font and that is opened by someone else who does not have that font in their fontbook it will not show to them unless it is saved as a jpg where it is embedded. 

Although It is a reliable way to exchange documents independent of hardware and software it is now more possible to change the document but only with specialist software.