This time’s Cyber Monday Deals List comes with a slight twist! This is our collection of tech that should be in every designer’s wishlist/gift-list. If you have any of these goodies, you probably swear by them, and if you don’t own any of them, now’s a better time than ever! Here’s our list of dope tech that should be in every designer’s arsenal of digital weaponry!
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01. MX Vertical Mouse by Logitech
Inspired by the formation the hand makes during a natural handshake, Logitech’s MX Vertical Mouse is a beautiful piece of design intervention that actually makes it easier to use your mouse for hours at an end. Tilting at an angle of 57° off the horizontal plane that is your table, the MX Vertical feels halfway between a mouse and a joystick. It can be held onto for hours, being maneuvered without strain, and is even easy on your wrist too, shifting the movement from side-side to up-down. Built with the regular left and right click buttons and the scroll wheel, the MX Vertical ups the ante with two more buttons for your thumb, and another button on the top. It even comes with a rubber gripping area with this subtle texture that looks absolutely welcoming!
02. QooCam by Kandao
With three fisheye lenses, a swiveling 45° joint, and a lens cover that turns into a stand, the multiple-award-winning Kandao QooCam can be a regular action camera, a 360° camera, a 3D Stereoscopic camera, and even a webcam. The slim camera that literally fits into the grip of your hand comes with stabilizers on all the lenses to make sure that your videos are jitter-free. Aside from capturing in 4K, the camera can even record at 120fps, albeit at a lower resolution. Switch to the stereoscopic mode and things get even more interesting. Capture 3D stills and videos that can be later played back on a VR headset, or better still, use QooCam’s 3D depth-sensing technology to capture regular 2D stills, but with the ability to focus anywhere within the picture AFTER clicking it, giving you the effect of using the portrait mode on a dual-camera phone, although with much better quality and much more control. Another trick up its sleeve is its lens-cover, that doubles up as a rather useful stand for the QooCam, allowing you to prop it up on a flat surface (there’s even a tripod mount, for better control).
A must-have for designers who also want to be content creators (especially in VR), or if you just want to capture sweet HDRI maps to use in your rendering software as backgrounds for your cars or even products!
03. Oculus Go by Oculus
The Oculus Go is the perfect dedicated VR headset if you want to begin working in VR but don’t want to break the bank. At a price that’s incredibly competitive, this untethered VR headset is brilliant. It doesn’t connect to a laptop or desktop, so not only is it completely wireless, you don’t need to own an expensive system too. It comes with in-built storage and a dedicated controller to browse through content. Obviously, the Oculus Go isn’t for heavy-lifting… you can’t 3D model in it, but you can view 3D files/content as well as 360° media in it. Besides, Netflix on the Oculus Go is an absolute experience to be had. Trust me!
04. Mountie+ by Ten One Design
They say the new iPad Pro is worthy of being quite literally as powerful as a laptop… but what would you (the average laptop owner) do with two laptops? I say merge them together into a super-laptop. The Mountie+ is an incredibly small, incredibly strong clip that allows you to fasten displays to your laptop screen, allowing you to have extended monitors, or multiple screens to work with. Use it with any tablet you may have (or even your phone) and mirror your laptop’s content to a new secondary screen… or use it to prototype your work on a tablet or smartphone. The Mountie+ is extremely reliable, allows you to mount your devices in landscape or portrait, and with the use of a simple connecting cable and mirroring app, gives you a lag-free secondary screen wherever you go, making it absolutely ideal for the designer who wants to work on and prototype digital products at the same time, or for the office goer who wants to work and facetime/conference together, or just the serial multitasker. Want to push things a step further? Use two Mounties on either side and go full-on panoramic!
05. Cellphone Podcaster Kit by K&F Concept
This rather neat phone-mount comes with a built-in tripod as well as its own condenser microphone. Not only a rather neat facetiming kit, this uber-cool product courtesy K&F Concept makes for a great kit for recording podcasts, unboxing videos, DIY videos, or just process videos of you to use along with screen-grabs of your work. A great way to go on from designer to design influencer, or a designer with a YouTube channel of how-to videos, the Podcaster Kit is a single, one-stop solution to converting your smartphone with its powerful front-facing camera into a podcast-making kit!
06. NeatScreen YouTuber Starter Kit by NeatScreen
Pair the Podcaster Kit with foldable, portable, durable green screen and you’ve yourself a studio too! The NeatScreen takes literally a minute to set up, and can be used to overlay any sort of background when you’re recording video. The instant-pop-up screen comes with blue and black cloth on either side, allowing you to flip it over based on your needs. The NeatScreen website also comes with its own library of high-res backgrounds you can use for various scenarios. Take your how-to videos or your product/design/unboxing reviews to the absolute max!
07. Mavic Air Drone by DJI
The Mavic Air is one of the most advanced 4K cameras on the market. It’s worth noting that this powerful 4K camera can also fly, detect and avoid obstacles, track people, and even recognize gestures. The drone comes in a beautiful, foldable design that fits into any backpack, and when opened, can fly for 21 minutes on a full battery, clicking pictures, taking panoramas, or even videos that are stabilized thanks to DJI’s world-class 3-axis gimbal. What’s more is that you can even use the Mavic Air controller with your smartphone to see what your drone sees in first-person POV. The Mavic Air can also be used to track objects like people, cars, animals, etc., and can even actively avoid obstacles or collisions on its own.
08. Nix Pro Color Sensor by Nix
Imagine stumbling across the perfect hue or color for your project, but having no way to record it. That’s the thing with colors. You can’t memorize them the way you memorize speech, or even remember an image. Once the color leaves your sight, it fades away. So what do you do when you come across a hue that you can’t get enough of? Perpetually carry Pantone Shade cards to compare colors? No, right? Just carry the Nix Pro along with you. Position it over a hue and the Nix Pro records the hue for you, quite like a real-life eye-dropper tool. It saves the colors and hues on your phone too, and allows you to tap into color standards like Pantone or CMYK to find the best way to replicate the color in your design projects.
