Optimizing Organization: Part 1 Brand Studio's Comprehensive Naming Conventions

Similar to many creative and non-creative teams alike, Brand Studio faced the delicate feit of efficiently managing, on average, over 60 projects at a time, amongst three distinct creative disciplines all while keeping our cross-functinal partners interests, timelines, and opinions in mind . Balancing these factors while adapting to the ever-changing requirements of the business challenged our project management team to be creative.The objective was straightforward: we needed to streamline the organization of creative assets, optimize productivity, and make collaboration more intuitive and efficient. After much consideration, the PM team agreed that to achieve our objective and scale to the needs of ServiceTitan, we needed to establish a universal naming convention and asset storage system. In this blog post, we will explore the cornerstone of our team’s new filing structure: our asset naming convention.

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Identification Tag

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Our asset naming convention begins with an Identification (ID) tag, a three-part grouping of digits identifying the Creative Discipline, Department, and Deliverable. For example, a “design” project for our Product Marketing team for an “email” asset would be tagged: 010308.

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Creative Discipline Identification

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Our team is divided into three disciplines: Design, Copy, and Video. The following numbers represent each discipline in the first two numbers of our ID tag.

Design: 01
Copy: 02
Video: 03

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Department Identification

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Our “department” identification criteria is a bit more flexible. We leaned on our existing company org chart, and considered “frequest customer” micro teams, such as Product Marketing and Demand Generation, and larger initiatives, such as Pantheon, for our final “Department” list. “Department” is reflected in the middle set of numbers in our ID tag.

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Deliverable Identification

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The final set of digits in our ID tag represents the deliverable type. The team created a comprehensive list of over 40 deliverables (design, copy and video) to note from.

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Final Product

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And finally, here is an example of a complete and final asset name:

010308-AdsOptimizerBetaEmailGraphic-300x300

Which breaks down as a design (01) project for Product Marketing (03) for an email (08) asset.

A few more notable nuances to our naming convention is that we opted to remove spaces and instead use title casing indicate a new word/space. We also use "-" instead of "_" or "/" to distinguish between sections of the full naming convention.  

In short, all Brand Studio file names now consist of the following categories:XXXXXX(ID tag)-ProjectName-Commercial/Construction label*-Channel*-Size*

*if applicable

And there you have it folks! And now our team and our partners can easily plug in a few numbers and easily locate any asset without having to go through numerous guesses of what a file could possible be named!

Stay tuned! Optimizing Organization: Part 2: Brand Studio's Streamlined File Storage System is coming soon.

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