Design Technique 17: Morgue File
Have you ever came across a project that was very similar to an older one that you just wished you had saved all the files from? Its a given this kind of repetitive situation is going to happen in your career as a designer so it shouldn’t be a great leap to consider creating a morgue file. As sinister as the term sounds, morgue files relate back to crime scene investigators and newspapers. They are simply a method of accumulating artefacts on the current project and saving them for reuse at a later time. The idea is to create a repository you can draw on when the need arises.
There are probably a couple of ways you can approach your morgue file. I’d suggest a series of simple folders in the real world and an electronic repository on your computer specifically set aside for placing your artefacts into when a job is completed. They could be electronic images (stock art and photography), newspaper and magazine clippings, screenshots of web designs (of the specific industry involved), references, old reports, pieces of things that influenced your own design and pretty much anything you found worth accumulating during the lifetime of a project. If it was worth collecting once it will be worth keeping in your reach for another day.
Keeping a morgue file not only allows you to save a lot of time by going back to previous work and investigation but also provides a strong arsenal of ready to use out of the box launching points when work comes to your door. There’s nothing like pulling that mockup together quickly from a scratch here and a matchstick there, so to speak.
