About

Tools of the trade

• Clip Studio Paint
  If you are interested in digital art I cannot recommend this program enough. It has many useful tools that Photoshop doesn’t even have, such as symmetrical rulers, custom perspective lines, and drop-in 3d pose-able models. It lacks a liquify tool and it’s typesetting features are very lacklustre, but everything else is top-tier. Oh and the best thing is it’s a one-off payment – they make most of their money off their third party asset store, so you can support independent creators in the process. It’s a win-win.
• Dash
  Dash is an incredibly handy app that saves documentation for offline reference. It also has an incredibly useful snippet feature, which I use pretty much every day to code. The snippet feature is super easy and simple to use and set up, and works on both Mac and PC. If you use it with a naming convention, you can insert a custom snippet pretty much anywhere, in any app, using a typed shortcut. For example, you could type !srcset to insert a snippet that has predefined srcset sizes, with placeholders to insert any custom attributes etc. It is as amazing as it sounds!!!
• Eagle
  Eagle is an incredibly useful app for anyone who designs or makes art. It is Pinterest on steroids. It is a one-time payment and works across two devices, on both Mac & PC. It is what Adobe Bridge always wanted to be but never got there. Eagle is essentially a visual database where you can save websites, graphics, snippets, pdfs, ETC, and catalogue them for future reference. You can easily link it to an online cloud storage like Google Drive or Adobe Cloud, and it is incredibly useful when you need inspiration for a design, on the fly. It is also useful for when you are feeling uninspired and are looking for a reference or something to inspire you. It also has a multitude of amazingly useful features, such as autoplaying videos on hover, smart sorting media by colour or tag, and extensive search and labelling capabilities. I encourage any designer to get this app because it is honestly so useful and has helped me be way more efficient at designing extremely quickly, because a lot of my research is done in my day-to-day browsing.
• Logitech M590
  This mouse is by far the BEST mouse I have ever owned. I am a big Logitech fangirl because their technology just WORKS. The most amazing thing about this mouse though, is that you can seamlessly use it between two devices, Mac or PC! It’s what Synergy always wanted to be, but far less buggy. Yep, you can move your mouse pointer seamlessly between two different screens connected to two different computers. You can even copy and paste between the two devices. As someone who uses both a Mac and PC daily, it is a productivity boost I’ll never get over. At $64 I consider this mouse to be an epically underrated bargain.
• Apple’s wired keyboard with numeric keypad
  Yeah, this keyboard is discontinued…but I maintain this is the best keyboard ever (and I’ve used a lot of keyboards). This keyboard is compact and low-profile, and very easy and efficient to type on – the perfect keyboard, honestly. Oh and wired is a MUST- because they are instant, require no setup, and they constantly and reliably just work. As someone who values efficiency in typing and coding, the keys on this keyboards are the perfect size and distance that allows for maximum speed and accuracy. I nerd out over this keyboard. But it’s going to be hard to beat the quality on this one, even for Apple.