Home » Arts & Design » Graphic Design

Gift Ideas for Graphic Artists

1 Comment

2 Like

Like 2

Pin It

Ranked #4,683 in Arts & Design, #73,088 overall | Donates to Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation

Gifts for the gifted...

Is there a graphics designer on your gift list? Are you looking for something to spice up your workplace?

When it comes to designers, choosing a gift can be quite challenging. As a professional designer myself, here are some of my favorite items that you may consider buying for your beloved design geek.

A Notebook

It's something we always appreciate. Personally, I look forward to receive it every year. We always need to jot things down and technology is not much of a helper on that. Most popular notebook brand (and the coolest!) among designers is Moleskine.

These notebooks come in many sizes for sketching ideas and drafts anywhere, anytime. These notebooks have been used by such artists as Matisse, van Gogh and Hemmingway.

Input Devices

We just can't have enough of these. A fancy keyboard, a state-of-the-technology laser mouse or a pen tablet. We just love these, they boost our creativity and speed.

The greatest gift would probably be a tablet. If your designer doesn't already have it, even the cheapest pen tablet makes a great gift.

Image is everything...

We designers have a little dirty secret. It's called stock photography. We purchase large amounts of stock images, footage and audio to use in our design projects. Last year I personally spent about 1000$ just for licensing stock images.

Today we mostly use royalty-free microstock agencies. It's cheaper and licencing is more flexible.

A subscription or download credits on any stock photography site is probably the greatest gift a designer could get.

Not all agencies support gift certificates or credit transfers. In this case, you can create an account, fill it with credits and send username and password over.

Here are some of the services I personally use and recommend.

Dreamstime: Dreamstime is a distinguished leader in stock photography and a major supplier of high quality digital images at reasonable prices.
IStockPhoto: 3,127,864 registered members, over 4 million images contributed by over 50,000 photographers at the rate of 27,000 images per week. iStockphoto is the largest microstock agency alive.
Fotolia: Fotolia is the first worldwide social marketplace for royalty free stock images, allowing individuals and professionals to legally buy and share stock images and illustrations.

Books, Books, Books!

Graphic designers like books about design, especially design in other fields. We also like to keep inspirational material nearby. Design annuals, designer portfolios and design element archives are perfect gifts.

A T-Shirt or a Mug?

We love custom designed stuff. T-Shirts, Mugs, Jerseys, Mouse Pads.. if you're short on budget you may consider these. Print your own design or choose from many designs from talented designers.

Design is a pain in the....

Wrist.. As you may already know, countless hours in front of the screen really hurts your wrists. A pen tablet is a nice solution to overcome effects of long time computer usage. The only problem is they are expensive.

Buying a gel wrist rest for your keyboard and mouse really helps, so gel wrist rests and mouse pads always makes a great gift.

Geeky Toys

Most of the designers are hardcore geeks. We love geeky stuff like glowing t-shirts, utilities, electronic components, survival kits and plastic chickens. yeah we're mostly nuts, so talk nerdy to us...

Low on budget?

Great Stuff on eBay

If you have plenty of time but no cash, collectibles like old ads, designer clothes, retro computers, old game consoles etc. on ebay makes nice gifts too.