A good designer friend of mine is excited this week because he’s getting a new MacBook Pro. This got me thinking about the design tools or general creative aides I find drool-worthy, and would love to have and get excited about. (These are in no particular order of importance or price, just how I thought of them.)
1. The Wacom Cintiq 12WX graphics tablet – Now, I have never owned or even used a graphics tablet before (I know, sad, right?) but I have long wanted one, and this seems to me it would be perfect. Decent size drawing area, yet compact, and shows what you’re working on in the actual drawing area, instead of having your pen working on a blank tablet while your eye is looking at the computer monitor (which I would imagine as a nightmare of coordination).
2. Nikon D90 digital SLR camera – for the heavy duty, blow-you-away-quality pictures. Professional grade, interchangeable lenses, 12.3MP, crazy ISO sensitivity, and all of the other gadjillion features that make Nikon cameras amazing.
3. Nikon Coolpix S550 digital camera – for more portable, less obtrusive photo ventures. 10 MP, 5x optical zoom, image stabilization, face-priority mode, red-eye fix, etc. etc., in a convenient point-and-shoot format.
4. Pantone Essentials Plus swatch book collection – for the amount of print work that I do, this would be extremely handy. But why so expensive, Pantone? Paper companies send swatch and sample books for free – get with the program!
5. Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design Premium – I got really lucky when CS3 came out, and actually won a FREE copy of the CS3 Design Premium software package. It seems I just got that, and now there’s a CS4. This will probably be awhile before I get it, as some of the printers I work with still need things in CS2, let alone CS3.
6. Vector Magic fully-licensed Desktop Edition – how many times have I had to recreate a new client’s logo in vector format because they only have .jpgs or .gifs? I suspect this would be a HUGE time-saver.
7. BlackBerry Pearl Flip phone – as much as I hate to admit it, this would be useful, particularly for checking work emails when out and about. However, I insist on a phone with real buttons, none of this touch-screen nonsense. And one that flips closed, as nobody likes to be butt-dialed.
8. Mac Mini w/ nice 20″ or more flat-panel LCD display – why not dream big, right? My current computers are a MacBook Pro laptop, and a clunky old Windows desktop. Would love to have the Mac efficiency and general prettiness on my desktop, too.
How about you? What are some of the tools or gadgets out there that have your creativity drooling?