The problem
Every job at Brandsurface starts with a folder — in theory always the same way. In practice, naming and subfolder structure drifted depending on who set it up and how much time there was that day: a missing date, a different word order, a "final" folder that wasn't final. Nothing was ever wrong enough to stop and fix, but it all added up to jobs that were harder to find, and impossible to search for reliably, a few months later.
The decisions
A shared naming convention only works as long as everyone remembers it under deadline pressure — which is to say, it doesn't. The fix had to live exactly where the moment of "start a new job" already happens: the browser toolbar, one click away, with no separate app to open and no path to type. Structure and naming aren't hardcoded — they're defined once as templates (customer, job number, date, job type) through a dedicated settings page, so the logic is configured a single time and then simply reused correctly, forever.
What was built
An extension that generates the full job folder structure in one click, following naming templates set up in advance. It writes straight into the folders Brandsurface already works from — local disk or shared network drive — so nothing needs to be moved or tidied up afterwards. No job gets set up twice the same wrong way; every job gets set up once, the right way.
Result
Running internally at Brandsurface, in daily use since 2025 — every new job starts from a folder that's already correct.
Contact me to get the latest version
Lars Sohl: Design and development · Internal tool, daily use · 2026