Inspiration has a habit of showing up when you least expect it. Whether you’re an artist, a writer, or in our case, a designer, you never know when inspirations, ideas, thoughts, flash through your mind. And when they do, the last thing you would want is to be unprepared to capture them. You ought to be equipped on the spot with the right instruments and accessories to not only capture such floating thoughts but to nurture them, explore and implement them.
Given the dynamic environment, a designer works in, we recommend eight key accessories and tools that every designer must carry every day. These tools would help you to be prepared for any kind of surprise.
Artists are spontaneous, and so are their approaches towards clinching imaginations, thoughts, concepts, feedbacks and reviews. They secure these abstracts by making them tangible immediately through sketchbooks. It’s much faster and convenient when compared with a laptop or an iPad. It’s spontaneous and lets you pour the creativity from your mind to the paper directly.
Designer at Lollypop believes that every design should originate from a sketchbook. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be there. Sketching still is considered the most time-efficient and flexible way to concretize your ideas. With a sketchbook, you can rest assured the random sparks of creativity that swooshes through your mind are saved and ready to be expanded into works of art at a later time.
Wouldn’t be incorrect to say ‘laptop is a designer’s best friend’. It’s as essential a tool for a designer as an instrument if for a musician. As a portable powerhouse of creativity, a laptop can let the designer work from anywhere, at any time. With the rising culture of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), you can not be always dependent on your office’s machine. As a designer, you must possess your personal laptop as well, which would give you that extra independence to be prepared for any unforeseen situations. Amid COVID19 outbreak, business suffered significantly before they could set-up work from home for their workforce.
Now, what kind of laptop works best for the designers? Well, as a designer you work on many tools, and sometimes concurrently. And nothing could be more disastrous than a system crash and you didn’t save the changes. That could leave you fuming and infuriated. We recommend you to use high configuration laptops that support all the adobe products seamlessly. Here is the system configuration Adobe recommends for its applications. MacOS has a slight advantage over Windows, as a few design toolkits such as Sketch are exclusive for Apple machines.
Although I mentioned sketchbook before, the sketchbook is incomplete with the artists’ tools that take those blank pages and turn them into works of art. A stationery bag holds those tools for you at all times, ensuring that all of your pens, pencils, brushes, paints, and other tools are at the ready.
Smartphones are pretty much already in everyone’s pockets today. But there is a reason it takes a spot in the list of designer’s essentials. As a designer, you need to be on your toes all the time, expecting surprises in the form of reviews, feedbacks, requirement gathering, etc. A high-end smartphone does help a lot in capturing and gathering data critical to your project. When you’re talking to your client, you can record those calls to playback later, recovering key details that may have been lost in the heat of the call. This also goes for meetings with the client, where you may have a rapid-fire brainstorming session with your fellow designers, creating ideas that might otherwise be left in the meeting room.
Make sure your smartphone has enough space to store all of this data, you’ll soon find that these little recordings and folders of research often tend to pile up more quickly than you realize.
When it comes to portable sketching and drawing while being more than just a regular sketchbook, nothing quite comes close to an iPad with the Pencil attachment. It’s not just an easy way to jot down designs, but also a tool to add incredible amounts of detail and definition into your designs, even when you’re on the go.
Having an iPad while travelling is about as important as carrying your smartphone or laptop. There will be moments where you cannot bring out your laptop to work on designs. There will come times when you’ll find that the pen-to-canvas nature of the iPad is just plain easier to work with for certain designs.
Music and design can create magic. Music insulates your mind from the world around you, giving you the solemn space to propagate your creativity. It helps to focus on the work when there’s too much going on around us. A good pair of headphones is a good accessory to carry for every designer.
Well, here is a secret, people tend to avoid nudging those who have headphones on. You know how to use this in your favour.
Whether it’s an iPad, smartphone, or laptop, all devices run out of power by the end of the day. That’s just the nature of technology, they’re not capable of a full day of heavy usage, no matter what the manufacturer says.
A modern portable power bank not only charges your iPad and phone, but the latest ones can even charge your Macbook. If you don’t have one already, look around and find a power bank that will deliver the power you need for all of your devices.
All the items that we mentioned above can be tedious to carry around. A good bag that is portable enough but with good enough space to carry all the essentials is a must.
These aren’t the only tools that you should be carrying around. There are many more, but we wanted to add the must-have tools we felt could directly impact your work. Their availability with you 24×7 will ensure your preparedness to tackle any kind of situation. However, depending on your personal preferences and style of work, you might want to add or subtract a few items from this list.
Do let us know which item you think could make on this list.
