A workflow that I regularly use in my design practice is using the screenshot keyboard shortcut on my Macbook by using ‘Command, Shift, 3’ to capture the process that my work and designs go through. I utilize this to document all the variations and changes that I create throughout a project and it comes in really useful to just document a design's journey. These screenshots that I capture come in useful when I am creating a process document for a brief or project however this workflow causes multiple issues.
The issues that I face when using this screenshot feature on my macbook may not be world-ending but they restrict the speed of my work when using the screenshots themselves to show the designs journey and my creative process. The first issue that it creates is the load of files that it just pastes onto your desktop after taking a screenshot of what you are working on, if you spend a long time on a design and it goes through lots of changes that you are trying to document within an hour your desktop can be completely covered by these files making your whole laptop look messy and unorganised. Another issue that comes from taking screenshots of a designs process is the fact that it captures the whole screen including your hot bar at the bottom of the screen and the menu bar at the top of it; for the screenshots to be legible for use in something like a process document you then need to open all of your screenshots into a software such as Photoshop and go through cropping your screenshots to your desired dimensions for use and taking out anything that isn't desired to be in the capture. This makes use of the screenshots a really long winded process and slows down what could have been a really good creative flow.
After doing some research into how I could enhance the process of screenshotting my design process I found that using the shortcut ‘Command, Shift, 4’ allows you to choose a snip to save as a screenshot rather than the full screen and this could be a quick enhancement that allows you to not have to then crop all of the captures. Another enhancement that would help this issue would be a tool for productivity and system utilities that can be downloaded onto your computer that sorts files based on the rules that you set for it. An example of a tool like this would be Hazel by Noodlesoft. It sorts files based on the rules you set, allowing the screenshots to be organised into folders rather than clogging up your desktop and making it unorganised; you can also set it to rename the files based on how you want so that your file organisation for the captures can be set with some form of order. Another tool that could be used if you still want to quickly capture as you go rather than taking the time to snip each screenshot from your screen is to record an action on Photoshop of cropping your first screenshot and then playing the action on the rest of your files to speed up the process of cropping each individual file.
