Proximity BBDO

Passing on Photoshop-files (and other design-, also accounts for development-files) is sometimes a gap in the bridge when it comes to slick workflow from one “department” (oh my God, please don’t ever use that word in practice) to another. As planning and budgets are sometimes inevitably tight there’s mostly not the time to take every file for a daily walkthrough. As some designers have to design outputs of different states inside a flow, a complex Photoshop-file has to be created. These files become complex when they contain lots of layers within nested groups (luckely they add up to a maximum of 4 subgroups) using masks and shapes with blending modes and more…

The key is LAYERCOMPS!

This handy, almost nifty, tool that is included since Photoshop CS came out is almost unknown to most (I mean a lot) people that use Photoshop (in a basic mode > not for heavy Photo-retouching for example). Some designers copy/past there layers and group them per state, but off course that only adds up to the filesize because you are putting the same layers in twice or more. Christ, I even know designers that make .psd files for every state they need to design, which of course clutters the jobmaps with tons and tons of designfiles.

Rule number one should be: giving layers a “logic” nametag, and doing this upon creating the new layer.
Rule #2: group and nest layers according to their appearance and placement in the design (and I’m mainly talking webdesign)
Rule #3: LEARN HOW TO USE LAYERCOMPS

There’r much more tips and tricks to create fluent workflow on passing on design-files off course, but in this post I just wanted to focus on the existence of LayerComps.