Designers are terrible at saving what we do. Most of us know that we should take the time to document what we’ve done for our own portfolios, if not for posterity. Yet few of us take the trouble. We usually wait until we leave our jobs and a portfolio becomes an imperative, or when a potential client spurs us to write a case study of a finished project.

In the analog world, this is merely an inconvenience. We scramble to dig up old mock-ups, assets, tearsheets, samples, and digital files. It’s tedious, but the definitive nature of analog design — the fact that there’s a canonical version of every brochure or book jacket — makes the archival process a straightforward one.

Archiving digital design, on the other hand, is far less clear-cut. It’s been said before, but it’s worth repeating that digital media is a conversation. To design for digital media is to design systems within which wildly varying kinds of interactions can happen, virtual systems that are conducive to great conversations. Conversations, however, are notoriously difficult to fully capture.

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