How to Design Better File Structures: Part 2 - Naming Your Files

Note: This article focuses on file naming conventions. For the foundational principles and philosophy, see Part 1: Philosophy and Good Practice.

Consistent file names with information tokens

File naming is all about consistency. Being consistent with your naming convention will make it easier to find files and will reduce the cognitive load when working in a team. Choose a naming convention for your files and stick to it.

There is no one-size-fits-all file naming convention. The one you use should be adapted to the nature of your typical projects, but it should stay the same for all your projects. Again, consistency is key.

It should contain a series of information tokens that provide key information about the file and the project.

The tokens should be separated consistently by using hyphens to separate words inside a token and underscores to separate tokens.

Avoid spaces and special characters.

Examples:

internal_brand-refresh_pitch_003.pdf
client-name_project-name_episode-name_scene-name_003.pdf

Avoid states in file names

Many people like to use states in file names to indicate the progress of a project.

• wip: Work in progress
• review: Review
• final: Final
• archive: Archive

This should generally be avoided.

Everything is forever changing, and few things are ever truly final.

An increment suffix like _004 is a much cleaner way to indicate the state of a file. You will always know _004 is more recent than _003. Plus, its alphabetical order will be sorted properly.

With that said, when a folder contains a large number of incremented files, an archive folder can be a good idea. No need to change your file names, just move them to the archive folder.

Patterns to avoid

• Confusing states: final.mov, final2.mov, final-FINAL.mov
• Temporal buckets: this-week, 2025-08-06
• People folders: john, marie (Projects outlive teams)
• Unclear names: random, stuff, misc (Ambiguity scales badly)