How to catalog your design library?

[T Shirt1]

We're creating a library of pretty generic name drop designs.  Now we need to be able to catalog them so custys have a specific reference number or code or whatever it might be.  They are  1,2 and 3 color designs and some of the designs are identical except there might be two and/or three color versions. I tried googling how to catalog artwork and got back -- start with a camera

Any clues on where to find info or how to start organizing this?

Thanks.
s

[lemorris]

There's gonna be some backlash, but I'm gonna say it again.

Try Adobe Bridge.

You can tag the photos with your keyword(s) and search by that.  i.e.  2, sports  (all 2 color sport designs come up)

If you have external drives and whatnot full of art, you can still make the location part of the properties, kinda like "where it lives" and find it.

In the past I used a free app named CATHY and it worked pretty good.  That was in the zip disk days though, but I imagine you can find an art archive program or somethin like that.

good luck

[T Shirt1]

Three little words  - art archive program (software) - yielded a good start.
Thank you.
s

[sweetts]

What about an access database cheap and as complex as You make it

Sent  from samsung gem(the worst smart phone ever)

[T Shirt1]

It's not the program itself we're after so much as a system of what to call whichever design.  We're trying to follow the wisdom of your signature line & keep it very simple.

[sweetts]

nomenclatures should be made so it makes sense to the organization using them. For schools we number 1 to whatever with colors blue/white green/ yellow  and they order by style/ number color/size. Of course they have a form with what is what. 

[mooseman]

we started the same thing some time ago.
what we do is create a MASTER CLIP / VECTOR ART FOLDER

in there we have for example  major categories like , MASTER AUTOMOTIVE or MASTER SKULLS
in the MASTER SKULLS we have or create the  necessary sub categories relative to skulls
example
TRIBAL (SKULLS)
SKULLS WITH FLAMES
GRUNGE SHULLS
WITH SNAKES
and so on.... we add / make as necessary any new categories when we see a skull clip we like "SKULLS WITH HEARTS".............

AUTOMOTIVE WE HAVE STUFF LIKE
CLASSIC CARS
STOCK CARS
DRAG CARS
MODERN CARS
ANTIQUE / VINTAGE CARS
CAR PARTS / ACESSORIES

from there any time we create , find, see, stumble onto , vector art clip art , google images etc that we think fits into the MASTER SKULL file we........... guess what copy it into the associated sub category of MASTER SKULLS FILE.

WE KEEP A ART DUMP FILE  that we do just that dump images into on the fly to later categorize as above.

seems to work for us..it is a PITA sometimes to collect and save a file but sure pays off when we need something we have already looked for.

best of luck
mooseman