Three ways to organize your Workspace

If you’ve been using Sketch for a while now, you’ll probably find that the number of documents in your Workspace is growing. And if you share that Workspace with others, that number of documents can grow even faster!

As more and more documents find a home in your Workspace, keeping things organized can be the difference between an easy day at work, or a search party (without any partying). No-one wants to spend their time searching for the right file to pull some ideas from.

To help keep things organized, we introduced Collections — a workflow-agnostic way to group related documents in any way that makes sense to you and your collaborators.

With all of this freedom and flexibility, you might be wondering where to start when it comes to organizing your Workspace. So, let’s take a look at three possible ways to use Projects and Collections.

Organizing by project name and status

If you’re working on a single product or for a single brand, your first level of organization could start with creating a folder for each new project you work on. For example: Summer Sale Campaign, New Website, 2.0 Rebrand.

Inside each folder, you can add another folder for each stage of your design process. For example: Backlog, In Progress, Ready for Review, Ready for Handoff.

This way of organizing your files means that it’s easy for anyone you work with to quickly find the right file. For example, a developer working on a new website build can find everything they need in the New Website folder (level 1) and the Ready for Handoff folder nested inside.

Organizing by client and project

If you’re working with multiple clients, another way to organize your work is by client and within the client folder, add a folder per project.

For example, you could have a Project named Acme Co, Big Space Explorations Inc, and Legal Firm LLP. And within each of these Projects, you could create another Collection for any new item of work you take on for that client (e.g. Website redesign, New branding, Seasonal ad campaign).

Organizing by brand and work type

If you’re a designer working across different brands, organizing your work by brand and then by type of work with the main folder, could help to keep things manageable.

In practice, this means you could create multiple Collections that group together illustrations, branding, website designs, app designs, adverts, and any other type of work inside each brand’s main folder.

Organizing your documents this way makes it easy to draw on your old work as inspiration for a new brand or project. In a couple of clicks, you can quickly find all the illustrations for a similar brand and use those to inform your next ideas.

These three organizational methods can kickstart your next Workspace Spring clean, but there are so many more ways to group your documents. It’s all down to what makes the most sense for you, your collaborators, and your workflow.

Once you’ve set up your Projects, you’ll see the same neat, organized Workspace wherever you use Sketch — on the Mac, on the web, or your iPhone or iPad.

If you’ve come up with a great way to organize your Workspace, why not share it with us over on the community forum? We’d love to see it!