http://stackoverflow.com/questions/50945/can-you-do-a-partial-checkout-with-subversionhttps://stackoverflow.com/questions/50945/can-you-do-a-partial-checkout-with-subversion
Specifically, not everybody has to check out the whole tree. TortoiseSVN has a pretty user-friendly GUI for this.
You can tell people to not check out certain folders (for example, programmers could skip the art source folder).
Depending on your exact directory structure, this won't require any changes on your part.
