Mandy BrownInterview
Designer, writer, editor (A Book Apart)
Adapted from Mandy Brown's interview on Uses This, published 19 March 2012. 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
The Macbook is in my lap or bag most of the time, though on occasion, I travel with the iPad and an Apple wireless keyboard.
I use a Magic Mouse when sitting at my desk at Studiomates.
I carry everything around in a Moop messenger bag; there's enough room for the Macbook, a Moleskin, and a print book.
Communication
I use Propane to connect to Typekit's Campfire account; we're virtual, with folks spread out between San Francisco and Berlin, so this is where much of our work happens.
I use it most routinely in Mail, for things like signatures, addresses, phone numbers, and salutations.
On my iPhone, I use TweetBot, and mute posts from Foursquare and the like.
Productivity
Things remains my to-do app, especially now that the cloud sync is in public beta.
Browser
I spend a lot of my time in a browser; usually Safari.
Chrome is arguably a better browser, but I seem to be sticking with Safari out of inertia and appreciation for its stronger visual polish.
Notes
Security
I use 1Password to log in everywhere.
Coding & Development
I use TextMate to code; I don't even really care that it hasn't been updated in a while - it suits my purposes as is.
Design
I'm co-founder and editor of A Book Apart, a former contributing editor at A List Apart, and communications director at Typekit (recently acquired by Adobe).
Storage
Nearly everything I work on is stored in Dropbox.
I keep Crashplan installed as an extra level of backup.
Other
I'm still running Snow Leopard, largely out of laziness.
TextExpander is like a magical assistant.
I recently started using nvALT 2 to take notes and I'm smitten.