Every year, April 27 coincides with the celebration of the International Graphic Design Day. A recognition that is carried out to give importance to this profession, for its contribution to generate changes throughout the world and become a tool of great social value.
The first edition was in 1991 and since then it has been called in different ways, all of them related to the need to commemorate the essential functions of the graphic designer in society and in commerce.
The date of April 27 comes from the fact that this initiative was developed by Kim Paulsen to commemorate the founding of the then Icograda (today the International Design Council), an institution founded on April 27, 1963 in London, to promote the union of the voices of graphic designers and designers of visual communication around the world.
To celebrate this day, Topes de Gama presents a selection of items related to graphic design, such as graphics tablets, accessories and computers.
Graphic tablets: unleash and develop your creativity
A graphic tablet or digital tablet is a peripheral that will allow us to introduce graphics or drawings or hand, in the same way that we would do it with a pencil or paper. It also allows us to point and point at the objects that are on the screen and are specially designed to be used instead of the mouse.
XP-Pen Star 06
This professional graphics tablet allows with a fine pen with 8,192 pressure levels, offer us the comfort of designing and illustrating in a more pleasant way at a certain distance on our desk. Dispose of six shortcut keys touch sensitive and a dial through which we can access keyboard shortcuts and most used software shortcuts.
Your 10 x 6 inch work area Offers ample space for comfortable drawing and painting. It includes a lithium battery that provides up to 16 hours of cordless use on a full 2-hour charge plugged in via USB cable. Its price is around €90.
Wacom Intuos Small
It is an ideal graphics tablet for drawing, painting and editing photos. For this, it has an active area of 7” and a ultra-precise and lightweight digital pen that incorporates 4096 levels of pressure. It has four configurable Expresskeys, as well as a drawing area of 152×95 mm. All this makes it the ideal device to express our creativity.
Includes a stylus accurate to 0.25mm digital tolerance, 7mm reading height, two configurable buttons, replaceable nibs, ergonomic, battery-free design. Along with the power of the pen, free applications for Intuos S such as Coral Painter Essential 7 and Corel Aftershot Pro 3 allow us to reach high artistic levels. Its price is around €70.
HUION Kamvas 13
It is a high-end tablet that includes two modes that we can easily switch between. Its Pen Tablet mode will activate when the screen is off, which not only helps save energy, but also offers another way to express our creativity. The screen is fully laminated with an anti-glare protective film ensuring a comfortable viewing experience to minimize parallax. It has a 178° viewing angle and extra-wide 120% sRGB color gamut gives us vivid images with vibrant colors and details.
It also stands out for having an HDMI connection and supporting a type C to type C connection, which also allows connectivity with Android devices including all its functions. Its price is around €300.
Must-have gadgets and accessories
These gadgets and accessories are specially designed so that we can improve our performance, productivity and creativity.
Leotec Stylus ePen
It is a fantastic gadget with which we will be able to draw, write or take notes on a touch screen. It can be used with both devices with operating system Android, Windows or iOS; We will not need to download any type of program or connect via bluetooth. Just take out of the box and start using. It even works on protective glass!
It is a very light pencil, it barely weighs 13 grams, so it is an ideal tool to be able to take freehand notes. incorporates a 140mAh internal battery that allows us to use it for at least 12-18 hours in a row without the need to recharge. Its price is currently around €35.
HDD Seagate Technology Portable Drive
A gadget that we should include among our work tools is an external hard drive. With them we will be able carry all digital designs that we want and connect them to the equipment and devices that we need. This one from the Seagate brand has a capacity of 2 TB.
It connects instantly via plug and play with your PC and is Mac compatible via reformatting. We can transfer the files with super fast via USB 3.0 and is also compatible with USB 2.0. In addition, it provides 2 years of Rescue Data Recovery Service Plan for data recovery. Its price is around €80.
2 fingers glove
There are times when we spend a lot of time designing and our hands may sweat a little, especially when it’s hot. When you sweat, the skin that is in contact with the screen sticks a bit and can be quite annoying to work on. To solve it we can use this black glove with two fingersspecially designed to use with graphic tabletlight box, tracing light pad for your creative work.
It is made of high-elastic lycra fiber, with high air permeability and strong tensile strength, effectively improving work efficiency. Too reduces friction between your hand and the surface of the tablet, providing a comfortable feeling when drawing. It can be used on both the right and left hand. Its price is around €10.
Laptops for graphic designers
There are many graphic designers who need a laptop to work from different places or take their work home. These are the computers that are best suited to enhance our creativity.
MacBook Pro 2022
It is one of the best laptops for graphic design. For this, it has a spectacular screen with panel 13.3-inch Retina500 nits of brightness and a wide color gamut (P3) and 1 billion colors for lifelike images and incredible detail.
Inside we find the jewel in the crown with the presence of the new M2 chip made by Apple which stands for gross power. Its battery allows us up to 20 hours of autonomy on a single charge. It can be bought for a few €1500 in its version with 512 GB SSD.
Lenovo ThinkBook 16p
It is a very powerful laptop with a processor AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX de 8 cores and 16 threads and a graphics card NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060, with which it will be very easy for us to carry out the most demanding creative tasks. It’s accompanied by a large 2.5K (2560 x 1600) LCD display screen with narrow bezels that produce a 93% screen-to-body ratio, while low blue light technology protects your eyes.
The backlit keyboard includes a numeric keyboard and full-size arrow keys, which enhance your typing and browsing experience. Its rear vent design with vents on four sides offers greater thermal performance. Its price is around €2,249.
HP Pavilion x360
It is a convertible laptop capable of adapting so that we are much more productive from any angle. It has a chip Intel Core i5 Accompanied by 8 GB RAM and 512 GB SSD of storage, to be able to offer a good performance. Innovatively designed to rotate 360 degrees so that we can use it in four positions. Work in the laptop position, view content in the inverted position, play in the tent position and take it with you in the tablet position.
It has a 14” IPS touch screen with FullHD resolution and wide viewing angles of 178 degrees. It is also compatible with a stylus so that we can draw and paint directly on the panel. Its price is around €800.
Our recommendation
As we have seen, we have different tablets, accessories and laptops specially designed for graphic design. Among the options that we mentioned, we especially like the tablet HUION Kamvas 13Due to his high professional level, the Mac Bok Pro 2022 for being one of the benchmarks for design and the gloves since they are especially useful when drawing.