Since the beginning of my design career, I have learned to collect various materials and resources from various channels. A few years ago, when Internet SC was not as strict as it is now, wai.com became one of my most important resource channels at that time.

Collecting images and materials is an indispensable skill as a designer.

Of course, if you know how to collect, you must know how to organize the collection so that you can quickly enter a folder to get what you want when you need it.

My material library is based on large industry segments as the basis for classification. For example, a graphic design will be divided into countless detailed vertical fields, such as web design, font design, packaging design, vi design, etc. Materials can also be divided into vector or non-vector.

When we first collected data, the material library was extremely messy and even bloated. The entire folder has nearly two T's worth of content. During this period I reorganized it every other year. As experience increases, the size of the material library decreases each time. Alternately, each year's update will add some and delete some.

Now my spare hard drive contains less than 500g of data. Every folder has carefully curated and spare content. I can know exactly what's under each subfolder.

Some designers may have several terabytes of data in their hard drive, but they don’t read the content. They just throw the data in when the idea arises, and then never open it. This is of no use.

So hurry up and create your own material library.