What’s my setup?
What I do and what I use to get it done
I’ve always enjoyed occasionally perusing The Setup. I’m generally curious about what people actually do and what things they use to get stuff done which has inspired me to write a short article about my own setup.
Who are you, and what do you do?
Hey I’m Phil, a designer from the UK. I’m currently a Principal Designer at Booking.com based in Amsterdam, Netherlands, which is pretty nice.
What hardware do I use?
At the moment I’m using a MacBook Pro (Retina, 13 inch, Early 2015) with a 2.7 GHz Intel Core i5 processor and 16GB of memory, kindly provided by Booking. Its powerful, light and I get to take it home with me too so it’s my main computer for both work and personal use.
At work I have a 27 inch cinema display that I plug into as a 13 inch screen gets a little tight when I move from ‘admin mode’ to ‘design mode’. I also have an iPhone 6+ and a Google Pixel which I use for testing our apps.
I use Field Notes for scribbling thoughts, ideas and meeting notes mainly because they’re a great size to carry around and fit easily in my pocket. I use Midori Brown Leather Notebook for sketching and more thoroughly exploring ideas and problems. I always try to sketch and idea at least twice and explain it out loud once before even going near a computer, just so I have things clearer in my head. The notebook is basically a leather cover, refillable with different types of paper so is really versatile and is only getting better with age, unlike myself.
And what software?
I have three must have tools when it comes to software, everything is just nice to have. Sketch is one of those tools. I adopted Sketch very early on, mainly because I was struggling to get an AI license through work at the time, and I’ve never looked back. It has its quirks, bugs and things that drive me crazy like all software does, but on the whole it’s my number one tool for interface design.
I love Framer for quick prototyping. I’m a big fan of transferable skills so writing code to prototype is a great way to practice both my interaction and development skills. Being able to write in coffeescript and (terrible) JS also creates much more flexibility in terms of what I can create, as I’d rather be restricted by my own ability than by the limitations of a tool. Speaking of development, my tool of choice for writing code is Atom. It’s quick, flexible and comes with no frills or fluff, which is perfect for me.
I use a variety of other tools and software to varying degrees. I’ve been playing with Figma recently which I really like, especially for a large distributed design team like ours, and I use Affinity Photo for any type of image manipulation or photography editing which has ultimately completed my transition to a zero Adobe workflow, which wasn’t my goal, its just something thats kind of happened by accident. Right now I’m using Bear for taking notes and documentation. It supports markdown and is generally just lovely to use and really allows the content to shine.
I use good old terminal for git/version control and I’m currently using surge.sh for my own website which is brilliant and works seemingly like magic. For storage I can’t really fault Dropbox, it just works, and always has.
Other things I use
Other products that I use regularly are Overcast and Spotify for podcasts and music (I tried Apple Music but we really didn’t get on). I’m a bit of a designer cliche so I love my Hario v60 for delicious, delicious coffee and I’ve recently become a little consumed with the concept of a smart home so have an Amazon Echo, Google Home, Philips Hue and I’m just about to buy a Nest.
Dream setup
In terms of hardware or software, I don’t really have a dream setup, just whatever I need to get the job I’m doing done. Working remote, from a remote location in the middle of nature is the dream.
Whats your setup?
