It’s good practice to save your files habitually every half hour. I wouldn’t let it go any more than that. Remember, your time is money! That’s why you get paid to do what you do. Concurrently, it’s good habit to save multiple versions of your work. For example, if you’re working on a job named Graphic Elements, over the course of the project, you can save the different versions as such.
Either way you choose to do it, find a way that works for you and stick to it. Trust me, as elementary as this sounds, it’s the easy things that’ll save your backside in the long run.
Next, let’s talk about shortcut keys. I’m going to be talking about Photoshop and Illustrator in this section but In-Design, Dreamweaver, Flash, Swift…all the programs have shortcut keys and they’re essential for helping expedite your workflow. Learn them as much as possible and get acquainted with using them so much so that they become second nature.
The first step in learning your shortcut keys is to take a look at the menus and tools when you have them open. In each menu and on the tools, if there are shortcut keys associated with that command, they’ll be listed right next to the item. Try to start using those religiously. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about.
Most of them make sense too, for instance, to get the Text Tool, you can simply hit the letter “T” on the keyboard, click in your workspace and you’re ready to type or to toggle the rulers on and off, hit Cmd + “R”.
To find out more of the available shortcut keys, visit adobe’s site at the link below. This links to Photoshop’s key list but you can find all the other programs there as well.
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Photoshop/11.0/WSD578BD7D-07BC-46f6-AAC2-6E491E8AD818a.html
Tags: actions, apparel, Graphic Arts, Illustrator, Photoshop, shortcut keys, Workflow
