Why You Need a Technical Swipe File, and How To Get One

How Do You Get Your Swipe-File?

Easy. It starts with a cardboard folder and a ring-bound notebook.

Many people use fully-bound books during their day-to-day activities, but tearing these pages out is a risky move (I’ve tried it, and torn right through my work!). Avoid these kinds of books.

When you’re drawing a design or an idea, write it in your book as you normally would. Review it afterwards and see if there are ways it could be presented better. Redraw it on a fresh page, and tear it out an place it in your folder.

If you read industry magazines, tear out articles or even ads for products that are relevant to your current projects and place them in the folder.

Each week, fortnight or month (depending on how often your environment changes), empty your folder and put back only the items that are currently relevant, and discard the rest (although I am a little bit anal and place those pages in an archive folder for future reference!). The point is, your swipe file should be lite and current, and most of all, easy to search and retrieve. If it’s full of crap, then you will get frustrated with it.

This is such a simple technique, but so effective it was worthy of an article.

For those of you who are digital-only (I still haven’t made that jump yet) then there is a technology which I think is brill – Evernote (the winner of my readers ‘Free Tools’ contest last year). This is an online swipe-file in essence. It enables you to record snippets of almost any digital content – text, images, audio, etc. and retrieve them using multiple client types.

Evernote has a great feature that might just push me over the digital precipice – text recognition. Say you scrawl a diagram on a napkin (I like to call these ‘napkinagrams’) you’d like to reference in the digital world. Take a picture of the napkinagram using your blackberry/iPhone’s camera, and then reference it in Evernote. Hey presto, you can search the text on your napkinagram like you will using any other content. Marvellous!