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Q&A with Andrew Clarke

Designer and Director at studio Stuff and Nonsense

I’m Andrew Clarke. I’m a designer and a Director at my small studio Stuff and Nonsense. I’ve written books and I occasionally teach web design at conferences and workshops. Traveling and photography are my passions and given the opportunity, my wife and I would head off and not look back.

Hardware

Two weeks ago I upgraded my 13” MacBook Air to a 13” retina MacBook Pro. The Air was two years old and still ran perfectly, but I dropped and dented it when I was robbed a few months ago and that bothered me. I also have a mid-2011 27” iMac which is my real work horse.

My desk is also mostly littered with mobile devices which I use for designing. I’m constantly picking them up, refreshing a browser, then putting them down again. It’s a constant cycle broken up with periods of graphic or code work.

Unlike many designers, I don’t use sketch books and I’m not fussy about the workings out. I draw on anything that comes to hand including backs of envelopes and used printer paper. Sometimes I’ll photograph them to send to someone, but mostly the go in the bin.

For photography I popped my Canon SLR in a box two years ago and not used it since. I use a small Olympus PEN EPL3 and most recently an iPhone 5s.

Software

I’ve loved Adobe Fireworks for as long as I’ve worked on the web and I’m mortified to think that Adobe are letting it die by not updating it. I’m experimenting with Sketch and with WebCode, but it’ll be years before I’ve moved on from Fireworks.

I use Espresso for writing code, Hammer For Mac for processing it and Ghostlab to sync to all my devices while I’m designing.

I prefer the look of Safari to Chrome, although that’s been my default browser for a year as its syncing across devices is so damn useful.

I don’t use Photoshop for designing, but I do use it for image retouching on the Mac and PS Express on the iPhone too.

Dream

I guess I’d love a high resolution desktop display, but honestly I’m pretty happy with my current design set-up. But as we are dreaming, I’ll pack for that endless road trip and include a better camera. Oh wait, this is a dream. That means all of them.