5 ways to streamline your creative workflow

Without a system in place, creative work can quickly spiral out of control. Before you know it, you’ve got multiple versions of the same file spread across different folders and platforms, and you can never find the right document when you need it.

If you’re drowning in a sea of digital clutter, we’re here to throw you a life preserver! Read on for five creative process management tips to keep your creative files organized.

It might be stating the obvious, but it’s easy to accumulate working files—whether they’re photos, images, videos, or documents—across a variety of platforms.

Maybe you upload your photos to Google Drive, create your social media posts on Envato, and use both Notion and Google Docs, depending on the client or your mood. Then, of course, there’s email, Slack, and all the other working apps.

Having your files spread across different platforms is a recipe for chaos, and you’ll soon find yourself wasting time searching for them—time that would be much better spent on your creative work. 

If you want to start to get a handle on your digital files, the first step is to choose one platform to centralize your storage. A digital asset management (DAM) platform can help you remove digital clutter by centralizing all your assets in one place.

If you imagine your digital files as a vast library full of books—metadata is like the information on each book’s label. However, instead of title, author, and genre, metadata contains details like what a file is, who created it and when, and other relevant information like client or project names. 

In your digital library, taxonomy is like the sections and shelves—in other words, the way you organize your files into different groups or categories. 

Using metadata and taxonomy will help you find files faster, especially if you use an AI-powered DAM that allows you to search by keyword, name of creator, date, or any other detail, so that you can forget about file names altogether. 

As your projects and team grow, so do your storage needs. Perhaps you set out as a freelancer and now run a design studio, managing a team of designers and a roster of clients—suddenly, the size of your digital assets has grown exponentially.

When it comes to running out of space, prevention is better than cure. Set yourself up with a solution that provides enough of it—including for high-res files—and can scale with your requirements, such as Google Drive.

Whether you’re a freelancer working on a client project or the leader of an in-house design team, creative work requires collaboration. 

There are many creative collaborative tools—such as Figma, Frame.io, and Trello—that allow you to share your work with team members or clients and collaborate in a variety of ways, such as comments, tags, chat, emoji reactions, and approvals.These features can help your work run more smoothly by removing friction from your creative project workflow management.

Tasks like tagging, categorizing, deduplicating, and organizing assets are the less fun side of being a creative professional. 

The good news is that most providers now enable you to automate these tasks, making cleaning up after yourself a whole lot quicker and easier. Some solutions even offer AI-powered automations like context understanding and image recognition, so that everything is sorted seamlessly.

Harnessing these tools can save you hours of time and ensure you never lose track of your valuable assets again.

With the right tools and systems in place, managing your creative project workflows becomes a breeze. 

Automations let you set it and forget it, collaboration features make teamwork the dream work, and with advanced search options, there’s no more playing “Where’s Waldo?” with your files. 

Now all you need for your next creative project is a source of inspiration — check out Envato’s vast collection of templates, stock videos, music, sound effects, graphics, and more to get started.

Want to learn more? Check out Beci Orpin’s tips for a better creative workflow, or check out our list of productivity hacks for designers.