The past few years as a graphic designer in an all-Mac environment have taught me a few tricks for digital asset management. You'll find variations of this setup among various agencies and firms. I have a folder for Active Projects, and finished projects go in an "Archives" folder, where they wait to be burned to DVD. Each project folder has the project number at the beginning, with a descriptive name. Everybody has a different naming system. Some places use just numbers, and some combine letters with numbers. At my firm, we combine 2-3 letters that identify the client with a 4-digit job number. Each client starts at 1000. So if I were doing a project for you, Jamie, it would probably be JP-1000.

Each project folder has 6 folders in it: copy, final, images, proofs, support, and working. Copy contains text supplied by the client or written by our copywriter. Final contains the final collected files or press-ready PDFs, and I try to avoid placing this folder there until the end so as to avoid confusion. Images contains all flattened image files used in the layouts. Proofs contain all the proofs we send to our clients. Support is a little bit slippery: it's not quite copy, not necessarily image resources, but could be research material, inspiration, or some such other material that helps us arrive at the final product. The Working folder contains the layered Photoshop files and working layout documents. A Flash developer could keep .fla files here, and put .swf files in the Final folder.

Now that that's out of the way, here's how we manage versions/revisions. Normally, when things are comped (comprehensive layouts that are still open to revisions) we do 1 to 3 different layouts. These can be in one InDesign file in the working folder, with each layout on a different page. Or they can be named compA.psd, compB.psd, compC.psd, and so forth. We send clients proof PDFs. When we do a new revision to send to the clients, we append "_rx.pdf" to the file, where x equals the revision number.

So if we were doing a brochure for the Jamie Phelps company, it would have a project name like JP-1001-brochure. The layout would probably be named JP-1001-brochure.indd, and you'd get a proof named JP-1001-brochure.pdf. Let's say you want to modify some things, so we do that and send you a first revision. The first revision would be named JP-1001-brochure_r1.pdf. Ideally, it would get done in under 3 revisions.

Final files have "_f" appended to the name before the file extension. This is something of a holdover from the old Flightcheck software we used to use for preflighting Quark layouts, but it's a useful naming device to indicate that a project is finished and that this file is ready to go to press. Your final brochure would be in a folder named JP-1001-brochure_f or as a PDF named JP-1001-brochure_f.pdf inside the "final" folder, depending on how the printer prefers uploaded files, which we normally send via FTP.

I know it's a little different for web design and probably very different for programming, but I hope this helps. I think a consistent folder structure and naming system is key.