Project Management for Artists: Work Smarter with Trello

1. About This Class: As an illustrator or designer, art directors expect you to be talented, of course. But they also expect that you will deliver work on time and in an organized fashion. Being an artist who delivers work on time, puts you one step ahead of artists who are equally talented but who were constantly missing deadlines. Whether you're a professional artist or you're just starting out, it's never too late to cultivate good organizational habits. When you're organized and all the pertinent information for your big projects can be found in one place, your creative mind is free to do what it does best, create. So let's talk about how Trello can help you do just that. Hi, I'm Stephanie Fizer Coleman and I illustrate children's books. So in this class, I'm sharing how I use Trello to manage my book projects and regular to-do lists. But the lessons learned in this class can apply to any person, with any creative career. So even if you're brand new in your field and you don't have a ton of projects, it's a good idea to start building a solid organizational foundation now. When you book your first big project or find yourself working on several projects at once for the first time, you'll already be comfortable enough to manage those projects easily in Trello. Before Trello, I tried spreadsheets and I tried charts that I scribbled in a notebook, and neither of those things worked for me when I started balancing multiple projects at one time. These days I use Trello to track all my project information from checklist and art director contact information, to notes on revisions and lists of due dates. It's easy to get a quick overview of upcoming deadlines or to dive into a checklist for a specific book project. Using Trello for project management means I worry less about the details and focus on creating better art and I think Trello can help you too. So head on over to the next video and let's get started. 2. Why Trello? : All right friends. So let's talk about why you should choose Trello. Basically, I just want to tell you a little bit about why I have chosen Trello over the years. So the first thing to note is that I pride myself on being a really organized person. However, when I got to a point in my illustration career where I was juggling more than say, one or two different projects. I'm not going to say that I miss deadlines because I definitely didn't. But there was one specific point where I forgot to write down a deadline for a children's book that I was illustrating. And by the time I remembered that I didn't write that deadline down, I had two weeks to finish coloring a 32 paged picture book. I finished it, it was a miserable experience. I definitely don't ever want to do that again. So when that happened, I realized, "Okay, I need a better way of staying organized and tracking all of my projects.". I still love my Day Designer paper organizer. I use it all the time, but I need something that is going to give me just a nice overarching view of all the projects that I have going on, where my projects are in the whole process, what my deadlines are. And Trello gives me a really awesome way to do that. And what I really love about it is that it's super visual. So of course, I'm an illustrator so I love visual things. So that just means that I can use Trello as a pin board for the things that I'm working on. So if I'm working on a picture book, I can have different cards on Trello that will show what process I'm in on each spread. Have I done sketches for this? Have I done the flats for this? Have I done the final color for this? And I'll get into all of this in more depth as we go through the class. But I just want to give you an idea of the things that I love about Trello. All right. So one of the other things that's really awesome is that Trello syncs between your devices and it will also sync with other apps like your Google Calendar. So that means that I can check my Trello on my phone, my iPads, my desktop, whatever. I don't really use Google Calendar that often because like I said, I still like my paper day planner. But if it's something that you like to use, just know that you'll be able to sync your Trello deadlines with your Google Calendar and it's going to make your life a lot easier. Another plus for Trello is that it sends email reminders of upcoming deadlines, which I also love. So that means that if I've got a project that's due tomorrow, it's going to send me a little email to remind me that I've got that project to do, which is super nice. Another wonderful thing about Trello is that, in addition to using it for project management, you can also use it as your weekly planner or as a place to host all of your running to-do lists. I use Trello for all sorts of other things. I use it to keep track of projects that I need to do around my house or that I need my husband to do around my house. I use Trello to plan out Christmas gifts for friends and family. I use it to track my art that I've created for licensing, I use it for all sorts of things. So it's definitely got many layers. And I think once you get into using Trello, you're going to be like, "I could use it for this, this, and this.". And that's going to be super awesome that I can have all these things together. Another thing that you can use it for is your social media content planning. And I'm actually going to add a bonus video at the end of the class that is going to walk you through how I use Trello for my social media content planning. So I hope you find it useful as well. Trello is also awesome because it's an easy way to track deadlines for your projects and it's also an easy way to have progress checklists. So if I'm working on a book, I've got all of my deadlines listed in one place for that project. And then I can also have various checklists. So I can check off if I've finished all the sketches or if I need to do some hand lettering for a cover or if I need to finish final interior art or revisions or whatever. I love this little checklist and I think that you're really going to love them too. I think that the last and not the coolest thing, but a handy thing about Trello is that it replaces my old system of notebook charts and spreadsheets systems that were both time-consuming to maintain and just wasteful and frustrating. All right. So those are the things that I love about Trello and I hope that you find that you are going to love those things as well. Head on over to the next video and we're going to talk about setting up your first boards in Trello. 3. Create a Board: When you first start using Trello, you're probably going to see a screen, something like this, something similar to this. What we're going to do now is we're just going to take a look at creating a board from scratch, and then customizing that board to fit your needs. Over here on the right-hand side you see under links, we're just going to click on "Create a Board" and we're just going to name it whatever. Name it, Skillshare Demo. If I want to, I can pop this box out over here on the right-hand side and it's going to give me some options for color backgrounds, or if I want to, I can choose from some pretty photo backgrounds, just whatever seems lovely for you. I'm just going to go ahead and pick this mountain scene, I'm going to click on "Create Board" and now it's setting up my first board on Trello. The first thing that I notice is that this background is super-duper distracting. I'm just going to go over here under my menu on the right-hand side, I'm going to go to change backgrounds, and I think I'm just going to pick a color. Instead, let's just stick with this blue color for now, I think that works great. I think that's going to make it a little bit easier for you to see what's going on at this point. A couple of things that we can do before we get started adding any checklists and cards and all that fun stuff in Trello, we can go over here and we can just tap on our menu icon, and I'm just going to tap back to go to the main menu. Again, this is where you'll change your background if you want to. If you wanted to, you can go ahead and tap in here and you can add a description of your board. I feel like this is more helpful if you have a team that you're working with, or if you're collaborating with someone, and you're going to be passing your boards back and forth. I'm just going to leave mine without a description just because this is going to be a board for my own personal use, and I am not going to be sharing it with anyone else. One of the first things we want to do in our menu is we want to go to more, and one of the options that we're going to have here is labels. Go ahead and click on "Labels" and you'll see here that you get a really pretty little rainbow selection of different labels. We're not going to super-duper get into this right now, because you may not know what you want to name your labels at this point. If you do know, what you want to do is you just want to hit the little pencil icon off to the right, and then let's say I want to name this one sketches, maybe this one is revised sketches, and again, just to remember, I'm a children's book Illustrator, so I'm building this around that, flat colors, and maybe final colors, and then final revisions, and then maybe this last one is awaiting payment. Everybody's favorite thing. I've got my labels all set up. Again, you can set those up now if you want to, or you can just wait until later. You may or may not find that you want to use them, it's just something that you will need to test out as you work through setting up your own Trello board. Again, you can just go in here and you can change the labels if you want to, you can create a brand new label if you want to. It's going to give you some different color choices here, and you can add a new label to that as well if you need more than the ones that are already listed there. The next thing we want to do under menu is we want to go down to Power-Ups, and what we want to do is we want to enable the Calendar Power-Up. Because, first of all, its going to give us the ability to look at all of our deadlines for all of our projects in a calendar view instead of looking at Trello's cards, and if you want to sync this to your Google Calendar, or another calendar, you will need the link from this Calendar Power-Up. Over on the left-hand side in the search box, I'm just going to type in, calendar, and you'll see here is the first option that pops up, says, "Calendar, visualized Trello cards in a calendar view." Super handy. I'm just going to go ahead and click on "Add" and you'll see now over on the right-hand side under my menu, under Power-Ups, I've got my calendar listed. Now, another thing that you'll notice right now is that I have this blue bar pop-up that said, "This board has reached its Power-Up limits, upgrade to business class to enable additional Power-Ups." That means that with a free Trello account, I can have one Power-Up added to my account, which in this case is calendar. If I wanted to have a different Power-Up listed, because you can see there are tons of different options here, then I would need to remove my calendar and swap it out, or I would need to upgrade to business class service, which I think is like 9.99 a month. That's something to think about, but it's not something that you need by any means, you can just continue using your free Trello account, which is what I do. It's totally fine, so don't worry about it. Before we start making our own boards, let's look at how you can quickly switch between boards. I'm going to go to my upper left-hand corner and I'm just going to click on "Boards" and you'll see now that it has created a drop-down box for me that has got my recent boards, my starred boards, and then it's got my project boards here, and I can also create a new board from here, so that's extra handy. If I wanted to switch from my Skillshare demo board to this project manager sample board that Trello so kindly created for me, you just click on it from here, it brings up my other board, and then if I want to switch back, I can switch back to my Skillshare demo board. A couple more quick settings to take a look at before we head on over to the next video. You have got an option here to leave your board private, to make it public, or to share it with a team. Generally, I'm just leaving my board's private, unless like I said, if you're collaborating with someone, and you need to share that information, then you can change it so your team members can access it. All right guys, so that's just the very basics of just setting up a board, taking care of everything that we need to touch base with on our menu. Now if you head on over to the next video, we're going to learn about creating lists and cards, and we're going to talk about how you can use that to organize your life, and your illustration career. 4. Create Lists & Cards: All right friends. We have our Trello board set up and now we need to start adding some lists and some cards so we can really find out how useful this is. I want to go ahead and start with something that I use all the time, which is a weekly to-do list and a next week to-do list. What I'm going to do is, in the upper left-hand corner, I'm going to click on "Add a list" and I'm just going to type, this week to do. Awesome. Now, next to that I'm just going to type in, next week to do. Now that it's going to be it for now. Those are going to be the two lists that we're working with right now. What I really love about this is I just love having a running to-do lists for each week and then as I think of things that need to be done next week, or if I have things that need to be carried over to next week, it's super easy to drag things over which is fantastic. Let's just go ahead under our this week to do lists let's click on "Add a card" and I'm going to type and one thing that I need to do this week, and one thing that I need to do this week is, I need to finish Skillshare Trello class. I'm going to hit "Enter" when I'm done and that's going to add that item to my list, which is super handy. So I'm just going to go ahead and click on "Add another card" and we'll just write down another thing that might be on my list for this week. Let's see, we'll just say I've got a picture book and I need to finish sketches on it, I'm going to hit "Enter" again and I'm going to say I have a picture book that I need to color roughs for. I also from time to time just add in some personal things, let's say that I need to make a vet appointments for Leia, who is one of my dogs. So I've got four things that are added to my list this week. Then I can do the same thing for my next week list as well, I can drag and drop things over there if I want to. But let's say that I get through this week and I didn't get to finish my picture about color roughs or maybe I've finished them, but I need to go back and work on them again next week. So what I can do is, I can just grab this, I'm just clicking and dragging and I'm just going to drop it over into my next week list now. Then I can do that with any of these things. I can just drag it over here if I want to, and then if I need to, I can drag it back over to its original spot. That's great. That's just a super basic to-do list situation that you can set up on your Trello. What if I want to add dates to this, what can I do? What I'm going to do is, I'm just going to click on my first thing on my list, which is to finish this Trello class, and from here, I have got a broader option of things that I can do here. So one thing that I can do is, I can add some more information. I'll get into this a little bit more when I start talking about how I'm dealing with all of my book projects, but very often what I'll do is, I will write all of my deadlines and all the information that I need for a project. So in this description box, if this is a book project that I'm working on, I will write all the deadlines I have, I will put in the name and email address of the person that I'm working with through either the art Director or the Designer or the Editor or all those people. Because I just like to have all the information available in one place. It's super easy to reference and then I don't have to worry if I've deleted emails and then don't have that information anymore. So I just find it super handy to have everything listed here. Then what I can do is, I can set up my first due days. So I'm going to go over here to the right on Add to Card and I'm just going to go to due date, I'm going to click on that and then, let's say that this is going to be due on August 9th. I can change the time if I want to, but I'm just going to leave it at 12:00 PM, that's fine. Then I have an option down here to set my reminder. That is going to give me the option of pretty short reminder, so I can go two days before if I want to, but I can't have reminders for two weeks in advance or anything like that, but this is still helpful. So I'm just going to click on "Save" now. Then I'm just going to go ahead and click out of here and what happens now is, you see over on my to-do list, it's added my due date. So I can easily see that I have this due date this month. Now a cool thing is, remember we added our calendar power app. So if I go over to the right-hand side of the screen and I click on "Calendar" this is my calendar for the current month that we're in, and you'll see down here on August 9th, it has listed finished Skillshare Trello class because that's when I set this date for. I can click on this, it's going to bring up my card information so I can check everything that I want to from there and then we're good to go. So I'm going to exit out of my calendar view, go back to my regular view. Now, another thing that you can do from this card is you can actually add your labels. Remember, we talked about labels earlier, so let's take a look at those now. Again, it's on the right-hand side under Add to Card and I'm just going to click on "Labels". and you'll see now that it's brought up all of my label options that I created. Now, I created these labels with my picture book projects online, so none of them really fit with this topic of finishing my Trello class, but I'm just going to pick one anyway. Let's just say sketches, is a label that makes sense for that. So I've got my label added, I'm going to exit out of that. You'll see now that it's added the screen label here. So if my entire screen is covered with different lists and cards and I want to see how many projects do I need to be doing sketches on right now or whatever I've labeled it with, I know that if I hover over this, it's going to tell me sketches are green, and then if I have a bunch of green listed on all my cards here, then I can get a feeling of what's going on here. That is super-duper handy and we love it. If setting up weekly to-do list is not your jam and you would rather have daily to-do lists, you can do that as well. You can use Trello as a calendar. So if I want to get rid of this card, I'm just going to go here and I'm going to archive my list, and now I can add a new list and I can just go through here and type in the days of the week, and then we add weekends in case we're using this as a calendar. So, you can see this goes all the way across the screen, this is awesome. This works in the exact same way that the weekly to-do list works, and now as just that we're going to go through here and we're going to add things for every single day of the week. We can do the same thing, let's say that I made my vet appointment for my dog, we'll say that I've got a vet appointments for Leia and that's on Monday. I go ahead and enter that in, now I'm just going to click on that card, I'm going to go ahead and put my due date in, we'll say that it is August 5th and that her appointment is at 09:00 AM. Here we go. Then I'm going to set the reminder for an hour before, and then I'm just going to click on "Save" and now you'll see here that I've got this added on August 5th. Now it doesn't show the exact time until you get in here and actually look at the card. What you can do is you can either type it in here, just type it in your title so you've got it for easy reference. Now you see I've added that and you can actually see the time as well and you can go through and you can do your entire calendar that way, all the way through the entire week. That's super awesome. The last thing that we want to talk about when we're creating lists and creating cards is, I want to show you how I set up my project lists and how I'm keeping track of all of the book projects that I'm working on. Generally speaking, I am balancing about four to 12 book projects at any given time and those are in various states of progress. I'm not actively working on 12 book projects, but I might have 12 projects and maybe half of those I'm waiting on feedback and then maybe two or three of those I'm sketching, or one or two of those I'm working on final art or whatever. So Skillshare has been, not Skillshare, Trello has been an amazing way for me to keep track of all the projects that I'm working on and just to have an overview of all of my deadlines, all of the things that I have going on, and what phase each project is in. It's amazingly handy for me and it's keeping me from running into those situations where I forget to write down deadlines and then have to spend two weeks hurrying through a picture book. So, the first card that I like to set up for my book project management section, is I keep one card that has all my deadlines on it. I'm just going to name this one book projects, and then we're just going to add some imaginary book projects. We'll just have four maybe. I'm very cleverly going to name these book number 1. Book 1, Book 2, Book 3, Book 4. So clever right now. You'll see what has happened here is I've accidentally added a label and let me show you how it happens. If I go Book and then I hit Shift and the pound sign, and then a number, it brings up my labels. It's bringing up the label that matches the number. This is my fifth label down. If I want to use that label, I can go ahead and hit it here or if I don't want to use that label, I can go ahead and exit out of that. I'm going to go ahead and delete this card. Then we'll say that I've just got these book projects. Book Number 1, let's go in and add some deadlines. I'm just going to make these up. These are not sensible at all. We'll say final arts wake, January 5th. Sure. Then if I have any contact info I might have like Art Director is Sam Smith and his e-mail address is samsmith@coolbooks.com, because that's not a publisher and that's fine. I've got all of my information created here and set up and ready to go. I'm just going to tap on Save. Then what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and set a due date for my first deadline. I know that for this one, I need to have my sketches by August 5th, so I'm going to select my due dates. I've already got it in here because I chose August 5th as my vet appointment for my dog, and then I can set a different time if I want to, I can leave it the same. I'm going to set my reminder for two days before hit Save and now I'm done with this card. Then I'm just going to go through and do the same thing for these other cards. That's it for my book project list. That means that I have got a running list of all of my books that I'm working on. I've got my next due date for each project set here so I can easily see what I have and then if I need to, I can drag and drop these around. I like to keep the soonest due date at the bottom, which doesn't really make any sense. You would think it would be at the top, but who knows? This is how I would organize mine. Then if I want to check any my other deadlines, I just go in and I click on my card. I can see my other deadlines that I have in here. I can type other deadlines if I have things that have changed, or if I have like a little sub-deadline in the middle of there like maybe I have a deadline for revised sketches or something like that. If I do have a due date that changes, then I just go click my due dates, and then from there I can select a different date, save it and now I'm good again. Then I can just move that so it's in the correct order because that's on September 20th and this is on September 5th. I prefer to have this soonest due date on the bottom. That's just my weird jam guys. The next thing that I like to do is I like to have lists set up for the various parts of my projects. That means that right here I'm going to have a list for Sketches, I'm going to have a list for Revisions, a list for Final Art, and then a list for Awaiting Payment. Then maybe another one for Approval Pending so I know what's going on here. Here's what I like to do. If I'm starting my Book 1 project right now, I might add a card and we're just going to call it Book 1 Sketches. I don't necessarily have to add a due date in here because I've already got my due date listed on my original list over here, but if I want to be doubly sure that I remember that due date, then I'm going to just go back here and I'm going to choose August 5th, and I'm going to save it. Now, from this card, this is where I like to start adding checklists and everything to my cards so that's something that we're going to take a look out in the next video, but it's coming up. It's super fun. Let's see. Now, the next thing that I might do is let's say that Book 2 has sketch revisions that I need to do. Maybe I'll go in here and I'll set up a deadline of August 23rd for that. Now, final arts. Maybe we'll say Book 4 is ready for final art. Again, I don't have to set up a deadline here because I've already got it, but if I want to, I can go back to my original Book 4 card, see that my final art is actually due on March 20th. Then I'll just click ahead here, choose my due date. I'm good. What we'll pretend is that I have done my sketch revisions for Book 2, so I'd go in here, check my date. I know that I've finished this already. You'll see that it says complete now. Now, I can take this and I can drag it over into approval pending, which means that I've submitted thus to my art director or designer and I'm waiting on their approval before I move on to the next phase. Now, if I get that approval, what I can do is I can drag this because I've done revised sketches and if I get the approval that says, "Hey, go to final art." Then I can just drag this card over to my final art column and I've added and that to my list. Again, I can reorganize these based on whatever my due dates are going to be. The last thing that we're going to do is let's say that I finished final art on this, final art, and this was for Book 2. Book 2's final art was due on February 15th. I'm just going to go pick my due dates to Saturday. That doesn't make sense, but that's okay. Then I can just uncheck that because it's going to show up in my list again. If it's February and I finished, I can check it off. Again, it might go over here into this approval pending bucket until they get the thumbs up for my art director that the final artist is good. Now, I can stick it over into my awaiting payment bucket. That just gives me a running list of projects that are finished but haven't been paid yet so I can keep an eye on those and check in with my agents and see what is up with those. That's just a basic layout of how I have been using Trello to manage my book illustration projects. I'm going to invite you to come over to the next video with me and we are going to talk about adding checklists to these cards, and we're also going to be talking about adding images to your cards. Then a little bit later in the class, I'm going to show you a different way that you can be setting up a project board for a book project that you're working on. 5. Adding Checklists & Images: In this video, we're going to be learning about how to add checklists to your cards and how to add images to your cards. First of all, let's go over to my little sketches list. I'm going to click on my card for Book 1 sketches. Then under Add to Cart, I'm going to click on checklist and that's going to let me create a checklist. I can name it whatever I want to. We'll just call it sketches. Now I've got the option to add items. What I would do is I would just make a list. I'm just going to type in some names and I press "Enter" after each one, and it sets up a checklist for me. So then maybe I'm just naming these spread 1, spread 2, spread 3, spread 4, will stop at five even though there will technically be more. Now I've got a checklist that set up. The super cool thing about this checklist, if you're anything like me, you love crossing things off lists, it feels so good to do. In Trello, the thing that feels really awesome is that you've got this little percentage bar right here that tells you your percentage completed. When I click this little tick box, it's going to tell me that I've finished 17 percent. Then as I go through here, it'll tell me more and more. The bar goes across there and it shows me how close I am to finishing my project. When I'm finished, it turns green. It says 100 percent and I'm done. Now the cool thing here is that, let's say that I've got two spreads left, so I have six things that are on my list. You'll notice right here, if I look at this card on my list, it's got my checklist listed right here. It tells me that I've done four of six items. So I know that I've got two spreads that are left to sketch. When I finish all of this, it'll give me a little green box that lets me know that I've finished this and then I can move it over to the next portion if I want to. Now I can also choose to hide completed items. That means if I click on that, it's only going to show me the things that I have left to do, which is also nice. Instead of having a big list staring you in the face, you've just got a little list to deal with instead. Then once I'm done with that, it all disappears and I'm done. Then I can add checklists to all of my cards. Often what I'll do is I'll just keep running checklists listed. If I have another checklist, will say this one is revisions that I'll add and then maybe I just had revisions that I had to do for spread 2 and spread 4. Then maybe I'm also going to add another checklist for final arts flats. Then again, just type in whatever we needed to. Then maybe finally, I'll have a checklist for a final arts color. Then I can just add. I'm all done. Now the other thing that you're going to notice here is that because I have multiple checklists listed here, when I look over at my card, it's going to give me the number that I have completed out of the total items I have on checklists. So that's not just for one checklist anymore, that's for all of the checklists that are listing there. It's a little bit deceiving. You have to choose whether you want to keep a running list like this, or maybe you just want to add a new checklist every time you start a new portion of your project, it's up to you how you decide to use that. The next thing that I want to talk about is how to add images to your cards. This is going to come into play in the next video that I'm going to show you where I'm going to talk about creating a board for each project that you're working on. You're going to be able to post cover images so you can see what you're working on. Here is my Book 1 sketches card again. Let's just say that we've moved to this one over to final art. At this point, we'll change the name of it. Now we want to add a cover image so we know what we're doing. We're just going go to attachment under that to card section. Then you can choose from any place that you have photos stored. I'm just going to choose my computer from my Instagram file. Then we're just going to go ahead and pick one of these images real quick. Just pick my lemur. You'll see now that it's added this image up at the top. That's going to be my cover image. I can go ahead and if I don't want this to be my cover image, I can click on "Remove as Cover," and it's just going to show down here as an attachment. Or it can make us cover and it's going to add it back to my card. If we click out of here, you'll see now that I've added this image. If I needed more reference, if I wanted to see, if I want a picture to represent the project that I'm working on or the stage that I'm at in specific spread, then it can add that here. You being able to add images like this is super handy when you're doing something like using Trello for your social media content planning, it's super nice to have just a visual reference of what's going on. It's so handy. Head on over to the next video with me and we're going to talk about a different way that you can manage your projects and Trello, and it's definitely going to tie into adding images like we just did. I think you're going find it really fun and hopefully, really useful. 6. Create a Project Board: All right friends. In this video, we are going to be learning how to create project boards. For example, in my case, that means I would create a board like this if I'm going to be working on a book project. You can also use this if you're a licensing artist and you're building a collection of greeting cards, or you're building a fabric collection. Any work that you're doing where it's going to be helpful for you to see images of your process, so you can get a nice overarching view of everything that you're working on. The first thing that we want to do is we want to create a brand new board, and the reason that we're doing that is it's going to keep our main board from getting really cluttered. It's just going to keep everything on it's own nice little space. I keep my original board which is very similar to this where I have my project deadlines and then I have what step I'm at in the process, and then this board for me also has my weekly to-do list and then my next week's to-do list. I really just have an overview of everything that's going on. It's so helpful but let's create a new board. In the upper right hand corner, we are just going to click on the plus, we're going to create a board and then we're just going to name this Book 1. Then we're just going to stick with the blue backgrounds and we're going to make sure this is much private. Then we're just going to go to create a board, I'm not going to mess with the settings right now. This is our book project and what I want to do here is I want to have a car to set up for each spread that I'm working on. There are a few ways that I can do this. I can just make a list all the way across. Let's assume that a book that I'm working on has 14 Spreads that I need to create. We could just do spread one, spread two and then just keep going across here and you're going to see what's going to happen here in a second is that I'm going to get to the end of the screen and now it's going to start scrolling over. This is fine. If you're fine with this, then I'm fine with this too, whatever works for you. This means that I have to use the bar at the bottom and I need to scroll across. That means that, let's say, if I want a quick look at everything that's going to go on here, I'm just going to be able to scroll across here, which is fine. That's not a problem at all. Personally, I like everything to show up on this one screen here. I like to do things a little bit differently. Really, it's just your preference, you don't have to do it this way, but I think it's really nice when I'm working on a book or another big project to be able to see all of the art that I haven't processed just on this one screen. It helps me not only quickly see where I'm at in a project, but it also gives me just a really nice quick view of the flow. I can make sure for example, that my colors are looking really great together or whatever. Here's what I do. I'm just going to go back to my card here, you don't necessarily have to name these if you don't want to, but we could say that this is going to be spreads one through three. Then this is going to be Spreads 4 through 6, Spreads 7 through 9, Spreads 10 through 12 and then this one is going to be Spreads 13 through 14. Let me go back and make this Spreads because it's going to drive me crazy, I'm sure someone that's watching this was just driven badly by that. What I'm going to do now is on each list I'm going to add three different cards. I'm going to add a card for Spread 1, a card for Spread 2, card for Spread 3, and then I'm just going to do the same thing here and I'm just going to do this all the way across. I've got a setup for all of my Spreads. I'm sure you're wondering what in the world is going on here. You should also know you can label these however you want to, sometimes I don't label it Spread, I label it like Pages 2 through 3, Pages 4 through 5. Whatever fits you better is awesome, I'm just showing you an example of how you might do it just to get your brain jazzed up on this whole organizing thing. What I'm going to do now is, I'm going to go to spread one and let's say that I've finished the sketches for this spreads. I'm going to add an attachment and for this one, I'm going to just use the same sketch for a piece of art that I created. Let's just pretend that this is a different sketch. Every time that I add it, let's just pretend it's a different sketch. I'm just going to go in here and add my sketches all the way across real quick. This is the same sketch that I'm adding on everyone. If I was actually working on a book, I would have the sketch for that spread, I would have that pictured here instead. Give me just a second, I'm going to go ahead and add these to all of our cards so you can really get an idea of what it looks like. Awesome. You'll see what I've done is I've got my sketch listed now. Now, you can really see why I love doing a separate board for each book project, and that's because I can easily take a glance at this and see what is sketched and what is left. I can take a quick look at this and I can see that spread 11 and spread 13 have not been sketched yet, and I need to go ahead and get up on that next. Then once I've got those completed, I'm just going to go in, I'm going to add my sketch for that so I can get a nice overview. Now, I can look at this and say, okay, all of my sketches are done for this book. Let's say really quickly that I want to switch back to my other board that's labeled Skillshare Demo. This was going to be Book 1, final art is what we're pretending that we're working on so I can drag that over into approval pending, and then I'll know that I'm waiting on my art director or the designer on the book to get back with me and let me know that everything is okay. We'll just pretend that is a sketch instead of final arts. Now, I can easily switch back to my book project here. Let's say I start coloring this artwork. The cool thing is, let's say that I started with Spread 1, I can go in and I can add a new attachment here and I'm just going to pick the color version of this artwork. If I want to, I can leave both the original sketch and the finished color sketch if I want to. It's completely up to you if you want to have just your list of attachments in here to refer to. If you don't want to have that, you can just delete it and its fine. But you'll see now when I go back to my main board, I can now see that I've finished the color on this one spread and I can see what I've got left to do. Then basically what I would do is I will just go through here and add a new color image every time I finish a spread, and then again, I have a really quick visual reference. I can see really quickly which spreads need to be finished, and because I've got these nice small images, I can see how well everything is flowing and playing together. Because very often when you're looking at something at a larger scale and you're not looking at all of your pages together, you're not really catching things like, oh, maybe the color isn't flowing from this spread to the next, or maybe this is jarring or maybe I've changed my mind about something and I need to take care of it. The last thing that I want to go over about creating project boards is that in addition to tracking your images, of your sketches and your final art and whatever, you can also track your revision notes here. If I get an e-mail from an art director that requests sketch revisions on Spread 5, I can go in here and I can either add under the description or I can add a comment that says whatever the revision request was. I usually do it under description because it's at the top of the card and it helps me to ensure that I actually see it and that I don't overlook it. If I had an e-mail from an art director, I would just copy and paste here. We'll just write and revision request here, and then I'm just going to hit enter to save. Now, I can see here on spread fired, I've got these little bars right here and that tells me that there was a comment on that and that lets me know that I've got a revision I need to take care of. When I've got Spread 5 pulled up in Photoshop and I'm working on it, I can just pull this up and then boom, there is my revision request. I can take note of whatever that imaginary revision request was and as soon as I'm done with that, I can delete it. if I want to or I can just leave it on there. If I delete it, then I know that revision request is taken care of because they don't have those three little lines there anymore telling me that there's something written on my card. That's just a really quick fun overview of how I am using Trello to manage my book projects. Like I said, this is really great for any project that you are going to be managing that requires you to have a nice quick visual overview of things. I love these boards paired with my board that gives me a general overview of all of my deadlines, and where I'm at in the process of each project and also have my weekly and next week to-do lists on there. I love my planner. I'm such a big fan of my day designer and I use it all the time, but I find this to be much more helpful because I've just got a really quick view of what's happening. For example, if I go back to my other board and if I get a new book project offer and the deadlines are August 5th and September 20th, I can quickly look at my book project list here and I can say, oh, I've already got a book due on August 5th and another book due on September 20th. That won't work maybe we can try this instead. That's it's way easier for me than flipping through my day design or trying to reconcile all of my dates and everything. It's just much easier to see everything listed here. From this board I can go to my calendar view and If I swap over to my calendar review, then you'll see that I can see all of my things that are coming up. I can scroll through here and I can see that I've got two things on August 5th, I've got one thing on August 15th, and then I've got something on September 5th and September 20th. This makes life super easy being able to just scroll through here and take a quick look at that, and then I can just go back to my regular board. Head on over to the next video and I just want to show you two other quick and easy things that you can do with Trello that will probably make your life a lot easier too. 7. Duplicating and Moving Cards: Okay friends. In this video we're going to be talking about just two quick things. We're going to be talking about duplicating cards and moving cards to other boards. This is handy if you need to have one list or card that's on different boards. It's not something that I use very often, but I find that I do use it often enough that I want to tell you about it. If I want to copy this entire list to another board, I'm just going to go ahead and click on my three dots right here. I'm just going to go ahead and copy my list. We'll just leave it named book projects and now you see that I've got a duplicate of this first one right here. Now I'm going to have my three dots again. I'm going to go to move list. You're going to see here, I'm going to have a list of my available boards. We're just going to say that we want to move this to book one project, which is the project that we just started. I'm going to click on move. Now it's gone from here. But if I go over to my book projects, you'll see right here now that board or that list is moved over to this board. That's a super handy, easy way to do that. You can also do that with your individual cards. You can also copy a cards. You can copy all of the attachments, the location, you can say where you want to copy it to. From the card, I can go copy it to my demo board and we'll just say maybe this is final arts. Go ahead and create it. Now when I go back over to my skill share a demo board, you'll see that I've got this new card that's added in here on my final art. That makes it super handy if I just want to have a reference image or something like that added to my cards over here so I can see what's going on, so I'm going to delete this. All right. Then one final thing that I want to go over is I just want to talk really quickly about labels. We talked about that in the beginning. Now, I don't use labels a super lot, but you might find that it is something that's handy for you so I do want to go over it real quickly. All right, so say we are on our spread two right here under Add to Card. I'm just going to click on "Labels." Let's see. Obviously my label names have disappeared for some reason, let me see. Okay, so I can go in here, I can add my label for sketches and that's just going to tell me where I'm at in the process. I just finished sketches. Or if I want to, I can go back into my labels, can add another one. See this is final arts. Let's fix that. We will tap right there. Now if I want to uncheck the sketch as one, all I do is just click on it and it removes my sketches one and then I've got my final art layer so I can hover over this. It'll tell me what it means, or I can also just click on it and it'll pop it up and tell me what it means instead. That's a quick and easy way to use labels if you want to. All right guys, that is it for this video. I'm going to do a bonus video for you next. That is going to cover how I use Trello as a social media content planner. Head on over to the bonus video and then after that, I'm going to talk about your project for the class. 8. Bonus: Social Media Content Planning with Trello: In this bonus video, I'm going to be chatting with you about how I use Trello to manage my social media content planning. Now for me at this point, social media is Instagram, Pinterest, and then also my Patreon. So those are the three things that I manage on here usually. I just want to show you guys a really quick layout of what I have just to inspire you and give you some ideas of how you might use this as a content planner too. Now, you can see here that I don't have this setup very visually. Right now I could if I wanted to, but for this planning, I just feel like it's a little bit better for me to have quick lists, and then if I need to have photos, I'll add them over here. Starting on the left hand side, I will have a list of my content for whatever week that I'm on and I'll just have the date listed. That means that for every day of the week, I will list what I plan on posting and then I'll upload an image to go with that, if I need to see that on whatever I'm posting on Instagram or Pinterest, or if I don't have an image, then I'll just have a little written description of what I'm doing. Then for each thing, I'll also have a due date on it, that way it pops up a reminder for me or sends me an email and lets me know that I need to share student projects via Instagram stories or whatever. Usually my list right here is a lot longer. But because it's summer, I've been being a little bit chill on my Instagram, this list is usually way longer than this. The next thing that I like to do is I like to have ideas for things that I can share on social media. I found that this has been a huge help for me because it just takes away the stress of trying to figure out, "Oh gosh, what am I going to post on Instagram today? What should I share on Pinterest? So stressful." What I do is I have a weekly plan. This is my Instagram weekly plan right here and you'll see I've just listed out every single day of the week, and then I've got some ideas of things that I can post on my Instagram stories or things that I can post on my Instagram feed. Then I also have a little reminder about my Friday newsletter and I have a list of ideas for my newsletter and whatever listed on that card, and then I also have a list of hashtag ideas because I try to rotate out my hashtags on Instagram on a fairly regular basis. I keep a running list of ideas, I have hashtags that I'm using right now and then I can go in and edit those hashtags if I want to. Another thing that I like to keep a running list of is ideas of things that I might post on Pinterest. I've been focusing a lot more on Pinterest lately, so it's good for me to just have a really quick list of things that I might be posting just in case I don't have any good ideas. The other thing that I like to post on here is I've got a list of my content for Patreon and my due dates for all of those rewards. I've got all the content post and then I've got all my due dates listed, so it can be sure that I get everything delivered to my Patreon folks in a timely manner, and then the last two things over here on my social media content calendar. I've actually got two things listed here, combined. I've got projects to share, and then I have a list of funky holidays, just because I find that sometimes jumping on a funny holiday hashtag is a good way to get your art in front of some new people, so I've written out a list of things that I might be able to come up with something to share on these particular days, and then I'll also write when I have book launches. My next book that's coming out this year is coming out October 1st, it's called Bird Count. I've got this book listed here just to remind myself that, in the week or two before that, I'm going to be talking about Bird Count, so I've just got that. So it'll be in my mind that my Instagram posts and my Pinterest post will be built around that and then I've got another project listed here that I didn't share so I've got it like in the bank if I want to. Speaking of in the bank, I've got an image bank over here and this is where I post brand new art that I haven't shared or art that I haven't shared in a very long time that I would like to share again, like this little Cuban gnatcatcher here and then this usually has more stuff in it. Then what I can do is I can drag and drop this over to my weekly lists so if I decide I wanted to share this on Tuesday, I can just drop it over here. I can select my due date of Tuesday and then if I want to, I can make a note like, I'm going to post it in my Instagram feed, and there you go. I've got that listed and then I would ideally have more images listed in my image bank so I always have a ton of backup stuff. All right guys, so that's just it. That's a quick overview of how I've been using Trello to manage my social media content planning. I hope you enjoyed seeing this additional peek into how I'm using Trello to keep my work and my social media organized. Head on over to the next video and we're going to wrap it up and talk about your project for this class. 9. Your Project: Thanks for hanging out and listening to me chat about how I love organizing my projects. I really hope that this has inspired you and I hope that you are ready to jump in and start doing some organization on your own big projects as well. Your project for this class is simple. I just want you to create a Trello project board or a to-do list board and share a screenshot in the projects and resources section of the class. You don't have to share a lot of your detailed schedule information if you don't want to, just share your basic list setup so we can see and get inspired by what you have set up. As always, feel free to ask any questions in the community section of the class. I do my best to respond to comments and questions within 24 hours and I always love hearing from you. Thanks again for watching this class. I hope you've enjoyed it. I hope you're inspired and that you've learned a lot. I will see you next time.