Well, it’s that time of year again. Yep, as we all know, Persephone has returned from Hades and spring has sprung. It also is a good time to do a little design spring cleaning of your own.
1. Clean up your desktop. No, not your desktop, your computer’s desktop. You no doubt have let some digital files accumulate there. Now is the time to categorize them and put them away. Hey, you bought that cool designer’s wallpaper: show it off!
2. What the heck, let’s clean our real desktop, too. You could probably use the desktop real estate that is now covered with partly read design books, old page dummies and folders, and unread memos from your boss about your newspaper’s design stylebook. Cleaning up and filing away what’s important would be a good thing.
3. Clean out your unused software. If you haven’t used a software program in awhile, remove it. If you are like me, you have probably downloaded some free software during the past year. It may have sounded interesting at the time, but if you haven’t used it in awhile, dump it. You can always download it again.
4. De-fragment your hard drive. You likely haven’t done that in awhile, and as a result, your InDesign files are spread out all over your hard drive. Digitally, it looks like your desk. What a mess!
5. Backup your important work (which you probably haven’t done in a while — be honest) and archive it in zipped format on both your workaday hard drive and a USB backup. Don’t whine. DO IT! I just lost 10 years of files because I didn’t and a hard drive — under warranty from Dell — failed on me. The warranty doesn’t cover data loss, just the drive.
These five relatively simple tasks will clear the clutter from your mind and from your worklife and allow your creativity to come through. You’re welcome.
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Owner, News Design School