Practice
Process
The archive as a tool
I kept a folder of saved images for six years and it was worthless. Forty thousand files, no structure, and I never once opened it while actually working. The problem was not the collecting. It was that I had built a museum instead of a tool.
Collections are retrieved by problem, not by look
I had been filing things by appearance — folders called “minimal”, “editorial”, “bold type”. But I never sit down with the thought “I need something minimal”. I sit down with “this page has three competing pieces of information and no obvious hierarchy”.
Refiling by problem changed everything. Folders are now things like “too many entry points”, “long text that has to feel light”, “navigation with unequal weight”. Ugly names. Enormously more useful.
Write one line or do not save it
Every saved item now needs a sentence describing what problem it solves and how. If I cannot write the sentence, I did not actually understand why I liked it, and saving it will only add to the pile I never search.
This cut my saving rate by something like ninety percent. The archive is now about two thousand items and I open it most weeks.
Revisit and delete
Twice a year I go through and remove anything I no longer find useful. This feels wasteful and is not — an archive you trust is one you have curated recently. The things I delete are almost always things I saved because they were fashionable, which is a category that ages faster than anything else in it.
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