Admit it. You took one look at that title, shuddered, and nodded emphatically. If not, then take a little scroll through your immaculately-sorted inventory because, even if – unlike the rest of us heavy shoppers – you don’t have a pile of unsorted stuff waiting to be neatly put away, you must have at least one folder where **!!<<OMFG MY STORE IS AMAZING!>>!!** sits above COME SHOP AT MY PLACE.
One starts with the letter ‘O’, the other with the letter ‘C’. Unless you deliberately sort every single thing in your inventory in date-purchased order, rather than alphabetically, the fact that C should come before O is… a no-brainer.
Why do creators do this? I tried to come up with some reasons, and they boiled down to the following:
- “Special characters put my item at the top of everything; it gets my item noticed1 more”
- “It looks cute2/creative/artsy/fun”
“I am expressing myself 3 through my branding”- “I’m going to make you file my item in its own dedicated place4, because you’re so sick of trying to find it”
1: Yes, for being annoyingly-named
2: No, it doesn’t
3: Actually, you’re telling me you don’t give a toss about my blood pressure or my filing system
4: Yep: the trash
UPDATE (July 5th 2013) – Ruina makes a good point in the comments about branding, and I’ll admit that I was being kind of arsey in this post about that. She’s absolutely right (see my reply to her), so I’ve struck that point out. (Note: if I’m ever wrong here, you won’t see me delete shit. I’ll strike it out, but let it stand. The internet is forever, so if you’re an arse at any time, might as well let your arse-ishness stand, rather than try and cover it up.)
Any more suggestions as to why, drop a comment, because I am stumped, dear reader. Thing is, I love many of these stores, but I am getting heartily sick of having to constantly re-name their folders (so heartily sick that, clearly, I’ve procrastinated for too long and I now have a complete morass of folders to work through *sigh*).
As a creator myself I wouldn’t dream of it, because if there’s one thing I know it’s this:
Putting non-alphabetic (for me, this also includes numbers, and when people use the letter ‘x’ as decoration) characters at the start of a folder/item name means your item gets LOST in the scrolling to get PAST all that stuff to find the stuff that’s actually named normally.
You want to be actually found in someone’s inventory? Give your folder a normal name. You do know that certain special characters trump other special characters, right? (Of course you do. You researched that and you use the very top special characters that come above everyone else’s special characters? Dear god, give me a fucking break!)
I’m going to subject you to the mess that is the special-charactered miasma of my unfiled inventory folders right now. Be prepared for a L A R G E image, my little darlings. I don’t like to brag, but you might want a little lube over there, honey, because this baby is BIG:
Mmm, betcha feel nicely sore after that ;-)
The red lines denote points where the alphabet ‘breaks’ (ie: a much later letter comes before an earlier letter). In the case of folder names that start with the same letter, any breaks are taken from the second letter (thus there would be a break between ‘brown’ and ‘beige’ if the former came before the latter, since ‘e’ should come before ‘r’).
Count ’em. EIGHTEEN breaks.
Now, find me the Æros ‘Miles’ avatar that I want to blog.
I’ll wait…
… I’m still waiting…
Ah! You found it! Thanks! I was looking for that ;-)
And, creators? The same thing goes for your inventively-prefixed landmarks…
Hmm. Well, I am one of the guilty party. But here’s the thing – not everyone organizes their inventory the same. For me, it’s *much* more important that folders organize by creator name, and that their folder names are *consistent*. I’m actually extremely methodical about my folder item names – they are meant to self organize by how I name them (not just the name of the shop, but the ‘department’ of the time, the style, the color, and so on.). And I lose things by other people *because* they don’t put their shop name first, or they don’t keep the branding consistent. As for as I’m concerned, my shop’s name is .{Rue}., not Rue. I suppose I could try and rebrand AGAIN but that’s the other thing that drives me crazy – people who rebrand a lot, or have a lot of separate brands. But hey, that’s it works best in their heads, so who am I to judge?
You’re right to call me on the branding issue; I was being a bit of an arse about that in this post. For stores like your own (and, as another example from my screencap, +Grasp+) – whose actual branding and logo includes special characters, naturally I would expect to see the same in the folder or item name (and, incidentally, I agree with you on the creator/store name coming first. My items are always labelled as Domicile: Item Name, etc.)
Exhibit 1: my inventory folder for your eyes –
I did rename the parent folder, because that’s in keeping with my general filing system, but the actual folder names are as you gave them.
The ones that bug me more are the ones that put things like emoji faces and quirky characters in front of their folder/item names, when those are not part of their store branding in any way, such as logo etc. For example, æros brands as æros, not as >> æros <<. (And I fucking love æros, so I’m not picking on them here; just using them as one example for my frustration).
So, in short, I completely agree with store names being first, and with consistency being good. It’s when special characters are used as I used the ! and space in the pic of my sorting method – to put an item at the very top – that I turn into Mr Crankypants. But, as you said, everyone is different and I was just having a whinge in this post because I’d let my inventory-sorting slide and ended up with hundreds of folders to rename so they fitted into my own personal filing system ;-)
I’ve edited my post to include this (not deleted it, merely struck out my snark about branding) because I was wrong, and you’re bang on the money with what you said.
haha I’m so unused to anyone agreeing with me xD So thank you! And I should have said in my original post, I do basically agree otherwise – when it’s not part of the brand or the item name … don’t do it. Clarity, consistency, and straightforwardness are all much MUCH more important in running a business (and writing vendor/folder names) then cuteness (imagined or not lol)
Unrelated to brands and folders – I appreciate your striking-instead-of-deleting policy. You haz the integrity sir :)