Hi, I’m Grace Smith

Show Me Your Dock Series! Part 23

Nikki Jeske

Nikki Jeske is a web designer and illustrator based in the outskirts of Austin, Texas. During the day, she creates websites for associations and non-profits at a small web solutions company, and by night she busies herself as a freelance graphic and web designer. She’s the owner and artist of Design Coyote and occasionally blogs about life and design at Snailbird.com.

I asked if she would give us the lowdown on the applications he relies upon as a designer and blogger on a daily basis.

The Intro…

While my prefered computer is a Mac, I’ve owned more PCs than I care to acknowledge (they’re good for gaming). Thankfully, most of my design work is now done on a beautiful 20″ iMac running Mac OS X with a resolution of 1680×1050 (and because that’s not enough space, I’ve got an old Dell Monitor hooked up to it as well currently at 1280×1024). It’s the love of my life (just don’t tell my girlfriend).

When it comes to my dock, you’ll mostly find programs that I use for work, and much of it is pretty unorganized. Maybe I should have some sort of pattern but really, where’s the fun in that?

The Dock…

Nikki Jeske Dock

Safari – My most-used browser.
Firefox – My favorite browser (many useful apps for development).
Entourage – Microsoft’s sweet little email program
iChat – Easy-to-use chat program from Apple.
iTunes – I cannot live (let alone design) without music.
Adobe Fireworks CS3 – Most used Adobe product. I’ve switched from Photoshop to Fireworks because of how easy it is to slice and how organized your files can be. Love Fireworks.
Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 – I actually use this mostly just to code content I’m plugging into test sites. It’s also good for reading jumbled up javascripts.
Adobe InDesign CS3 – When I need to create a .pdf file, this is my favorite program.
Adobe Photoshop CS3 – The old favorite. This program got me started into the realm of design and it’s never let me down. It’s all Adobe’s goodness in a simple package.
Adobe Illustrator CS3 – When I don’t draw something by hand, I like to go to Illustrator for all artistic needs.
Color Schemer Studio – Lets you pick up colors anywhere and saves color palettes easily for later use.
Transmit – My FTP client of choice – I love that it lets you open different windows within the same server when you don’t want to back out folders over and over again.
CSSEdit – CSS editting program that lets you preview both files and sites, validate your CSS with one click, and keeps everything wonderfully organized in its left panel.
TextWrangler – A more general text editor for every day use.
Preview – I honestly think people underestimate the power of this little tool.
ProWorkFlow Time Tracker – I use ProWorkFlow to manage my work projects and this nifty little widget tracks my time for me.
coRD – A remote desktop client that I use to access the work PC to check sites in IE.
Tweetie – My Tweetie. I don’t think it needs any explanation.

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A huge thanks to Nikki for taking time out to take part in the Dock Series.

If you would like to be featured in the Dock Series simply:

Download the Dock Series Template.
Email it along with the necessary images to: hi [at] gracesmith.co.uk.

Check out the other creatives in the series.

With more amazing creatives lined up, make sure to check back every Tuesday for the latest Dock Series installment.

Grace Smith is owner of the small but perfectly formed web design studio Postscript5, in Northern Ireland. To keep up to date with the latest designalicious content, then please consider subscribing.