Organize assets with layers and sublayers

Organize assets with layers and sublayers in Adobe Illustrator — with the four heights of help laid out: do it now, make it easier for the next person to accept, work out the right move when you are stuck, and learn the pattern so it stops coming back.

4prompt heights
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The four heights

The same task, four distances: today's deadline, the next reviewer, the stuck moment, the pattern.

Execute — do the immediate task

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I need the messy asset panel cleaned so the social team can pull icons. Move all icons into a…
I need the messy asset panel cleaned so the social team can pull icons. Move all icons into a sublayer named Icons inside Artboard 5, export that sublayer to SVGs, and keep original vectors grouped and named with size suffixes. Confirm no strokes expand or groups break on export.

Improve — make it easier to accept

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Before I hand assets to the content team, make them discoverable: surface file-size and artboard…
Before I hand assets to the content team, make them discoverable: surface file-size and artboard for each asset, put frequently used icons in an Assets top-level folder, and flag any linked files that will fail when unpacked. Suggest a simple naming convention for quick search.

Decide — diagnose the stuck moment

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I exported icon_subnav from the Icons sublayer and on staging the SVG is misaligned and stroke…

Exported SVGs look different on the website.

I exported icon_subnav from the Icons sublayer and on staging the SVG is misaligned and stroke weight changed. The web dev says the icon was 24px artboard but I thought it matched grid. What likely mismatch caused the distortion and what exact check fixes it before I export again?

Become — change the pattern

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Over the last six months the design team recreates icons instead of reusing vetted assets, so we…

We keep recreating the same icons for each campaign.

Over the last six months the design team recreates icons instead of reusing vetted assets, so we waste time and introduce inconsistencies. What habit or repo structure should we adopt to make finding and reusing icons the default, and how do we persuade designers to follow it?

Next to this one

Other vector design work people do in Adobe Illustrator.

Every task here came from the work, not from a feature list — which is why the prompts name what you want done and never the button that does it. The tool changes; the work does not.
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The rest of the map

Same library, five ways in.