Mike EsslInterview
Graphic designer, educator, Mr. T memorabilia collector
Adapted from Mike Essl's interview on Uses This, published 30 April 2015. 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
At home I rock an iMac 27-inch, Mid 2011 with 8GB of RAM and a 250GB SSD.
Connected to that is an Apple Cinema Display 23-inch in the portrait orientation and about 10TBs of external Firewire 800 drives.
The iMac and the Cinema Display sit on Humanscale monitor arms that are connected to an original GeekDesk.
I use an Apple Magic Mouse and a large Wacom tablet for illustration work.
On the road I use a MacBook Air (11-inch, Mid 2012).
Communication
Then I use another script to get the URL and title from each page and format it in Markdown.
Productivity
My portrait 23-inch comes in handy for tracking a manuscript in Microsoft Word while I make edits in InDesign.
I use Fantastical to manage my calendar.
Browser
Security
Coding & Development
Show notes are written in BBEdit.
(The scripts are cut and paste jobs though, I'm terrible at Applescript.) I preview the output of the script in Marked.
Design
Occasionally I'll jump into Adobe After Effects to make videos for web projects.
Font management is handled by FontExplorer X Pro.
Media
There is also just enough room to keep most of the InDesign palettes open with a VLC window playing my favorite TV show Supernatural.
If we record in the studio we use Apple's GarageBand.
Storage
Dropbox keeps both machines in sync.
Other
Adobe Bridge is useful for sorting and previewing a pile of images.
I also use Name Mangler to help rename the image files that come from publishers.
Everyone is telling me to use the Finder for this, but that seems like too much work.
On my Mac, I use ComicBookLover.
I'm still using MAMP Pro and BBEdit to write and test all my code.