This is useful during those late-night design sessions where I want to get my design work done and listen to some music without waking anyone up. It allows you to listen to music, podcasts and watch videos while you’re working, but without anyone else in your house having to hear it as well. Having a good headset also ins’t a necessity, but trust me when I say it’ll make your life easier as a graphic designer. I’ve been using the Razer Ornata Chroma for the past year and I don’t have a single bad thing to say about it. The back lighting is also nice because you can actually see the keys at night (and it just makes the room look cool.) Mechanical keyboards aren’t a necessity, but they will make your life easier as a graphic designer.Īside from the clicking sounds of the keys being so satisfying, it’s good to have a well made device that was designed to withstand the daily wear and tear that its consumer-grade counterparts can’t. I got the Toshiba hard drive depicted above back in 2013 when storage was a little more expensive, so you can probably get 1 TB for roughly the same price I paid for 500 GB back then. For example, I use one to back up my website every month instead of letting it fill up my primary drive. You’re going to need an external hard drive to add to your collection of graphic design studio equipment in order to back up client work and other important files. And graphic design work is no exception to that. External Hard DriveĪs the old saying goes, if it doesn’t exist in 3 different places, it doesn’t exist at all. It makes life very easy as a graphic designer. For example, I have Shift and Control programmed into 2 of the buttons so I can execute those functions without needing the keyboard. It comes with 11 programmable buttons that you can bind to whatever keyboard functions you’d like. This isn’t related much to design, but it’s great to navigate through folders and web pages using those buttons instead of having to click the forward and back buttons of the UI. It’s also convenient in that it has forward and back buttons built in. A Good MouseĪn advanced mouse makes your life easier as a graphic designer because it has adjustable speed settings built in. This means that if you’re masking a texture or cropping fine edges, you can adjust the cursor’s sensitivity accordingly. It takes a little while to get used to, but once you’ve adjusted it to your own preferences and have a feel for how it functions, it’s an absolute time-saver and a lot of fun to experiment with. I’m not much of a freehand artist myself, but this tablet has come in handy when creating calligraphic letters and text for logos. I’ve always been comfortable enough with a mouse and keyboard, but earlier this earlier I decided to give the Wacom Intuos drawing tablet a try and haven’t looked back since. The other monitor is an old 1080p unit that I bought back in 2010 and will be replacing pretty soon. I’m currently using a Samsung 28″ 4K LED as my primary screen. 4K is very quickly becoming the standard, so it won’t be very long until you’re left behind if you settle for less. Or, you can have your mood/inspiration board on that screen so you can just glance over at it instead of having to minimize windows over and over.Īs far as monitors go, anything with 4K resolution should be just fine. You can be doing your work on one screen and watching a Youtube video on the other. Trust me when I say that adding dual monitors to your graphic design studio equipment will make your life immeasurably better as a graphic designer. If you’re doing 3D, animation and/or video, you’ll definitely want to get something with a dedicated GPU.Ĭlick here to see my current rig that I built last year. If you want to be able to load and run your design software quickly, seamlessly, and without lag or slowdown, you’re going to need something a little more powerful than the standard consumer-grade computer.įor standard vector and raster design (like what you would do with Photoshop and Illustrator,) I would recommend getting a processor with a speed of at least 4.0 GHz (I’m personally a fan of the i7 by intel) and look for a minimum of 16 GB of DDR4 memory. Recommended Graphic Design Studio Equipment Updated Computer In this post I’ll be sharing some of the equipment I’m currently using myself and what I recommend. Proper graphic design studio equipment helps you get your job done quicker and more efficiently, saving you both time as well as money in the long run. Over the past 7 years that I’ve spent as a graphic designer, I’ve learned the importance of having the right hardware.
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