You are at their mercy. How do you work smarter?

Say you’re an artist within a web retail team (like me). The marketing folks decide they want you to develop a new design for their sales program. Unless your company has a very strict and organized hierarchical structure of planning and approving designs, you can be left at the whim of every person within your team and beyond. This means you will be in the reactionary mode of forever tweaking the design until all the “powers-that-be” are satisfied. Perhaps you can’t control what others do, but you can control how you deal with it.

For Print folks, deadlines can be a salvation. If the design is scheduled to go to print, it motivates people to solidify their edits in a timely manner, and hopefully, to think things through enough to get it right the first time. I’m sure there are exceptions, but this has been my experience.

In Web, however, things happen in real time because the web is “on” 24/7. This requires a certain kind of flexibility and a special kind of superhuman patience on behalf of the designer. If non-designers realize you can tweak things and immediately go live, then you can expect that to happen!

Every once in a while I’ll post time-saving (and sanity-saving) techniques that I have developed while working as a graphics designer in the constantly changing world of eCommerce and web.

Here’s my first few tips:

1. Save all “approved” versions of your designs. They are subject to re-approval at any moment. Don’t assume the first design is the right design. Depending on how long your chain of command is, and if 20 sets of eyes need to see it before its go-live time, you could possibly end up with an entirely different design at the end, only to have the first one suddenly approved after the last one goes live.

2. When making designs, particularly in Photoshop, keep all your Layers specifically named. Keep all named layers of your design in specifically named Group Folders. If you have multiple background colors or images you may have to toggle on or off, you would have them all in one Group Folder and they would be named so you (or your fellow designers) can easily find them. This is Photoshop 101 people…but it’s amazing how many designers don’t practice good workspace hygiene.

3. If there is any possibility you will be asked to switch out different versions of an image element (ie: a wallet that comes in brown, black and red), keep all versions you have in your layers. Today they want a brown wallet. Tomorrow, they might want a black one. Next week, it might be red. If you have a Group Folder named Wallet, you would have your multiple color versions of that wallet within that folder. It’s as easy as toggling a layer on and off should they want to switch the color.

Even if they tell you they just want a black wallet….do yourself a favor and keep all the color layers handy anyway. Minds change.

So, in essence, THINK AHEAD ALWAYS. Be prepared to turn on a dime. All designs should be built with complete usability and change-ability in mind. Thinking ahead will save you time and streamline your productivity, not to mention help any designers you work with who must also work within your files.