Catherine MulbrandonInterview
Designer (Visualizing Economics)
Adapted from Catherine Mulbrandon's interview on Uses This, published 2 October 2014. The kit is drawn from their answers and each reason is an excerpt, lightly edited. Shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the full interview ↗
Is this you? Claim this kit →Hardware
My digital home is a 2011 MacBook Pro.
There's a Canon PIXMA MX330 and a laser printer at my co-working space if I need to print a design to review; I often catch mistakes or sketch new ideas when I review the design on paper.
My older white Macbook from 2006 has been repurposed as my "entertainment center" for watching movies and TV online.
I've attached it to a small flat-screen TV (Samsung) and 20-year-old Cambridge SoundWorks speakers along with 10-year old AKG K 240 Studio headphones.
I recently bought an eBags eTech 2.0 Downloader Laptop backpack to be my portable office (my 20-year-old backpack is still around for everything else.)
Communication
I use to have a self-hosted Wordpress site but I got tired of having to be my own site admin, and Squarespace is a simple and cheap alternative to hosting services that provide a lot of support for Wordpress blogs.
Productivity
Harvest for time tracking and invoices.
Browser
Notes
Coding & Development
TextMate for my basic writing needs, from long emails to simple coding.
Design
When I want to sketch out an idea I often copy the data into OmniGraphSketcher, which is now open source and very useful for simple data tables.
Illustrator is where I often end up for my design process.
However, when creating my book, InDesign was indispensable.
The MAPublisher plugin for Illustrator is how I create my maps, but my most important mapping tool is my brother (an urban geographer who runs Design & Geography).
Media
Storage
Dropbox is my main document directory, so I always have access to my files on other devices or can easily share files.
Other
In 2011, I used Kickstarter to raise funds for my book, An Illustrated Guide to Income in the United States, which was published last year.
I have a library of icons I bought from DutchIcon but will sometime jump on The Noun Project if I need something quick.
Squarespace for hosting my web site.