After trying many times to regulate the manner in which Web site production is organized on the many design teams I’ve led, I’m still not at peace with the amount of control that should be imposed on other designers. On the one hand, everyone works in a unique manner, and it’s counter-productive to shoehorn a single, unified and overly detailed process on designers, who are typically free-thinkers when it comes to this working style. This I accept readily, but there are some things, admittedly low-level things, that I find it hard not to at least want to control.

There are more profound — and touchier — examples than this, but the one that has me preoccupied lately is the relatively trivial matter of organizing Photoshop documents. By and large, most designers approach the construction of a Photoshop document in an ad hoc manner, creating new layers as they are needed, not always naming them properly, or defaulting to Photoshop’s automated, serial numbering scheme, which happens to be generally devoid of meaning. I’d venture to guess that the vast majority of Photoshop documents are created in this way, and more often than not without negative consequence.

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