There is no perfect set of tools for graphic designers. We’re all unique, we all work in different ways, and budgets always come in to play. I’ve put together a breakdown of major factors when building the best graphic design hardware and software toolbox based on my experience. Consider the following as a guide, rather than a set of absolute rules.

Keep it simple

I’ve been a graphic designer for 30 years, using the Macintosh the entire time to produce work for some great clients. I’ve worked for ad agencies large and small, a design firm, printing companies, and I’ve freelanced full and part time. Over the years I’ve learned a few short rules as it pertains to building my design toolbox and getting things done—and it has held true everywhere I’ve worked. Those rules are: keep it simple no matter the cost, don’t get caught up in software trends and gimmicks, buy a little more than you think you need, because you will grow into it. The following is more specific advice for building your design toolbox.

Stick with the standards
Graphic design is an expensive field to get into. Buying a Mac ain’t cheap, but software can dwarf the hardware cost if you let it get out of control. The key is knowing where and when to invest your money. Notice I didn’t say spend your money. You can spend money on cheap software and hardware, but you’ll find that the cheap route ends up costing more in the long run.

When you start a design career, you’re probably looking to get in as cheaply as possible, but that’s not a wise way to look at it. Invest in the best hardware and software you can possibly get your hands on and it will serve you well for much longer than cheap alternatives.

If you’re starting from scratch, you’re probably looking at between $2,500 to $3,500 for a great Mac setup. Then you have to invest in some fairly expensive software—though in recent years it’s been getting easier to manage due to Adobe and Microsoft going to subscription models and other software dropping substantially in price. The point is, don’t complain about the cost of doing business. It’s just that. If you’re even a halfway decent designer, you’ll make up the cost of the software subscriptions in under 20 hours of billable hours (if you don’t, then you’re not charging enough). The cost of the computer is written-off over the course of years, it’s not like you have to buy a new one every month or year. Money well-spent now will pay off for a long time.

No matter how much you spend, stick with the standards. Adobe’s creative apps running on a Mac are the standard for the design field. It’s what is expected. You can get away with running any type of PC and a variety of apps, but you may find yourself on the outside looking in.

Next: Hardware and Software Utilities

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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

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Graphics Software

For print designers, you’ll spend most of your time in a page layout program. Adobe InDesign is the industry standard. Quark XPress is still alive, but just barely—used mostly in newspapers and smaller publications. Don’t try to break new ground here, go with InDesign.
Adobe has cornered the vector art creation market since the 90s when they bought Macromedia and killed Freehand. Illustrator is still the standard, but for the first time in my memory we have a serious alternative. Affinity Designer is a new application, but you wouldn’t know it after using it. For a 1.0 version, it offers a lot for print and web designers. If you don’t have an investment in Adobe Creative Cloud, Affinity Designer is definitely the route to go.

For image editing, things are a little more flexible. For print designers and photographers, you have two superb options. Adobe Photoshop is the industry standard, and will give you everything you need (and an absolute shit ton more that you don’t). But Pixelmator is a real option.
Pixelmator offers the ability to open and save PSD, JPG and TIF files, and is a lot less bloated, so it runs much faster. You won’t notice it as much on a desktop, but on a less powerful laptop, the difference is more obvious. Pixelmatr doesn’t support CMYK, but that shouldn’t matter if you’re exporting final artwork as PDF/X-1a anyway.

For web and multimedia designers, it almost seems like overkill to go with Photoshop. Pixelmator is all you need, and at only $30 it’s a bargain, but there are also a bunch of great image editors that offer screen-resolution editing—which is fine for web and multimedia designers.

Adobe Dreamweaver & Flash have plenty of alternatives, but none are a full-featured or widely accepted. If you’re a web designer, you almost have to go with Adobe Creative Cloud unless you’re willing to look at the less-capable alternatives.

As for me, I stick with Adobe’s Creative Cloud subscription service. It’s only $50 per month and you get every desktop app Adobe offers, plus access to thousands of fonts and other cloud-based goodies. If you work 100% by yourself, never share files with other designers or print shops, all work going out of your office is provided in PDF format, you can get away with using alternative apps. But the reality is that very few designers work in a bubble. For good or for bad, Adobe Creative Cloud is here to stay, and you’re better off accepting it and get on with making money.

Office

In the past, owning a copy of Microsoft Office was nearly a must. Now, I think you’re foolish to spend the money on it. First of all, you can register a free outlook.com email address and use Office apps for free on the web. And second, I can’t even figure out which version to buy. That’s probably good enough for most designers. If you have a Gmail address already, you can use Google Apps as well.
If you prefer to have desktop apps, Apple ships a copy of their iWork apps (Pages, Keynote and Numbers) with every new Mac. They’re fantastic alternatives. In fact, many companies are standardizing on Keynote for presentations because it’s that damn good. You can open and save MS Office files using iWork apps, so unless you have highly-specialized needs that only MS Office can offer, save your money.

Next: Web, Social Media and Final Advice

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Web

When it comes to the web, there are so many options that it’s difficult to limit yourself. You can waste hours of productivity just screwing around with different browsers and services.

When it comes to browsers, I’ve settled on Safari. It makes it easy to take advantage of everything Apple bakes into the Mac OS and iOS. It’s fast, stable, and does its job well. Whichever browser you choose, stick with it and don’t waste time messing with multiple browsers.
Back in the day, you needed an FTP app to send large files to printers. Today, FTP is still used heavily by web designers (I prefer Panic’s excellent Transmit app). But for print designers, a service such as Dropbox or Copy is a free alternative that offers not only file transfer & sharing, but the ability to sync files for those who have a desktop and a laptop. You can also take advantage of Google Drive or Microsoft One Drive – but I prefer Copy.

You’re likely to want a website to promote your freelance business. If you know HTML, your good-to-go. If not, stick with WordPress. It’s by far the most popular web/blogging platform for good reason. It’s simple to use, and the amount of free templates to base your design on is mind-numbing. It’s important for your site to look good, but don’t put so much focus on the design that your site lacks quality content. After all, that’s what your potential clients are looking for.

Social

There’s certainly no shortage of options when it comes to social media. Leaving aside any personal choices here, if you’re looking to use social media to promote your design business, you’ll be doing yourself a favor by sticking with LinkedIn and Facebook (and possibly Pinterest). While Twitter is awesome for consumption of content, it’s pretty rare to get a call saying “I saw a link you posted and want to hire you.” Likewise, sites like Dribble are great for inspiration, but the only people looking at it are other designers—not the people who are looking to hire you.

No matter what social media you choose to engage in, try to keep set hours of use. If you fall into the habit of checking and responding to your social media accounts every time a notification pops up, you’ll fall into a time suck that’s difficult to get out of.

Go your own way

In the end, graphic design isn’t about creating beautiful art. It’s about communicating a message for your client in a creative and appealing manner. The tools you choose to use to do that can vary. A Mac is not a necessity. Adobe Creative Cloud apps look and work the same on Windows as they do on a Mac. I used a Windows 7 machine for two years at one company I worked for and had no problems at all.

You have to find what works best for you. But if you keep it simple and focused, and take an ‘investment’ instead of a ‘spend’ approach, you’ll be giving yourself the best chance at success—and saving money in the long run.