Hardware
The first investment you’ll need to make is your Mac. This is absolutely the one thing you should think long-term on. You could try to go the route of a Mac Mini or MacBook Air to save money, but you’ll find that you’re going to grow out of it in under 3 years, maybe even sooner. Invest in higher-end equipment and you can easily get 5 to 6 years of use out of it (maybe even more), and you’ll get a lot more bang-for-the-buck.
If you’re going to be doing a lot of heavy duty video or 3D rendering work, the MacPro is the easy choice. For everyone else, the 27” iMac is the top of the line. I recommend the 27” iMac with the i7 processor upgrade, the upgraded video card, and a 250GB SSD storage drive. You’ll want the full 32GB of RAM, but you can get 16GB now, and add the 16GB later when you have the funds.
The upgraded processor, upgraded video card, and SSD drive offer a significant speed boost (particularly when dealing with large InDesign and Photoshop files), that will put your iMac nearly on par with a MacPro in many operations. While 16GB of RAM is enough, the full 32GB offers you the ability to work on extremely large Photoshop files, as well as keeping your Mac running smooth with lots of programs running at once.
If you’re going to be freelancing on the road a lot, a 15” MacBook Pro with Retina screen will satisfy your needs quite well. Obviously the 13” Retina is cheaper, but the increased screen real estate alone is worth the cost. Considering the faster processor and better video card, it’s a no-brainer. Again, you probably don’t absolutely need the upgrades, but if you’re a serious designer, they’re going to pay for themselves in no time.
If you go the MacPro route, you’ll need a nice LCD screen. If money is no object, the Apple 27” Thunderbolt Display is fantastic. But if you’re looking to save money, the Dell UltraSharp models are quite nice. I’ve had a 30” UltraSharp LCD for many years and find it to be a fantastic display. You may even want to get an external LCD if you decide on the MacBook Pro. When you’re working from your home office, it’s nice to have the extra screen real estate via a multi-monitor setup.
Beyond the computer and LCD, the only other thing you’ll absolutely need is a printer. I recommend getting an All-In-One from HP. 20 years ago, I used a scanner several times per day. Today it’s not as necessary, but you’ll still have the need once in a while. Unless you’re trying to produce nearly perfect color prints, HP offers the best mix of quality, speed, and affordability.
Utilities
When it comes to 3rd party software on the Mac, I used to be a hoarder. I still check MacUpdate multiple times per day just to see what’s new out there. What I found though is that while there are just a ton of great utilities, most are little more than one-trick ponies or major distractions. While I love trying new apps, I limit the ones I keep installed to ones that I use a LOT, have a business model based on income instead of user-count, and tend to stay out of the way when not in use.
Free apps and services are great, but you should avoid them for mission critical things because you never know when they’re simply going to disappear.
Default Folder is another long-time favorite of mine. It’s what Apple’s standard Open/Save and Import/Export dialog boxes should have been all along. Plus it allows you to assign keyboard shortcuts to open folders, both in dialog boxes and in the Finder.
Yoink provides a shelf to drag files to until you’re ready to drop them somewhere else. Since the window is hidden until you drag a file, it just stays out of the way until you need it.
Suitcase Fusion is almost a must-have utility for any graphic designer to help manage large collections of fonts, as well as auto-activate the right ones at the right time. It also helps you choose fonts based on their similarity to other fonts. Suitcase has been around for decades, and for good reason.
Pixa has found a permanent place in my dock for keeping track of my stock photo and vector art collection. I have thousands of images and vector files I’ve either purchased or downloaded for free over the years. It’s great to organize them by topic, client, etc. I can add keywords to make searching easier, too.
Bartender is a fantastic utility that helps me keep all those menubar icons under control and out of sight. You tell Bartender what order to place the icons in the menubar, as well as which ones you want hidden under its own icon. In short, it helps you organize those apps you choose to use, as well as keep most of them out of site—thus making them less of a distraction.
1Password is a fantastic app that I’ve been using for years. It’s not cheap, but it doesn’t require a lot of work to use. I use it to keep track of and auto-fill passwords on websites (which I do with a simple keystroke), and also to store software license codes and registration numbers.
No matter what utilities you use, make sure you’re using them because you NEED them and not just because they look cool, were free, or offer a single gee-wiz feature. Menubar meters are cool to look at, but do you really need to know (or care) what temperature your processor is running at? Didn’t think so. You’re sucking resources from the apps that you do need, and distracting yourself from getting work done.
Next: Graphics and Office Software
Boycott Creative Cloud! Adobe’s subscription-only lock-in scam is outrageous! I will stay on my perpetual license CS6 until it no longer functions, then switch to an alternative – probably Affinity Serif or whatever is ready by then. Terms and conditions of subscription are unacceptable. Look into it. In the long term you lose a lot with a subscription-only.
Good luck with that.
I believe I covered the pricing issues early in this article. But what is so horrible about the terms and conditions of Creative Cloud subscriptions, specifically?