Graphic House
If you’re anything like us your always dying to see what goes on behind closed doors. We’re a nosey pair and love to see what other peoples studios and workspaces look like, they’re very personal places and can say a lot about someone. So now it’s our time to let you see in to our studio, if you look back to well over a year ago on the blog you will find our first ever studio tour, where we tell the story of how we came to be in our office and what we did to it to tailor it to be just right for us. Well a year on we’ve made a few more changes and have a little update for you. Please, be warned the word Ikea gets used a lot below if you dislike to the Swedish home store as we know many of you do please stop reading.
Desks
We consider it to be a fairly basic piece of equipment for any designer but a very important one at that. When we first moved it we purchased 2 Micke desks from Ikea, they served us well and were a great solution until we decided to upgrade our screens to 27” models (more about these later). With them in places the desks started to feel very small and cramped, we hunted for new desks but found nothing we liked so decided to build our own (I use the word ‘build’ very loosely). What in fact we did do was buy two desktops from Ikea, two cupboards and 1 set of legs built them stuck them together and tada a super long desk for two people to sit at. Top tip: invest in these handy cable management racks from Ikea to hide all your cables under your desk. We decided to go with wood effect desks to welcome a bit of warmth back into the room but mainly because one day we want real wooden desks.
Chairs
So anyone that knows us well will know the nightmare we have had with chairs. Other than a laptop of some sort a good chair is the 100% the most important thing for a designer. Our last chairs were rubbish to the point that we demand a refund and actually got one because they were that bad and lasted about 2 months. On the search for new chairs, we observed a weird gap in the chair market (as I write this I realise how sad we are 😂) but it’s true. There’s a market for chairs from £30 all the way up to around £250 then a gap until about the £800 market, we’re not saying chairs don’t exist between those prices but from what we could find there’s not many of them. After much research and review reading, we ended up back at our favorite Swedish shop – surprise surprise. We purchased two Markus office chairs which seem to be the most popular at that price point (£150) and to be fair they’ve not been bad. They’re comfortable even when sat in for a long period, offer lots of adjustments and come with a 10-year guarantee. Like most designers, we dream of Hermen Miller chairs but at a starting price of £800, we might have to keep dreaming.
Equipment
As well as the studio our equipment has had an overhaul over the past year. We are currently running custom built 15” Macbook pros with i7’s 16gb ram and 1TB of storage, we were a little underwhelmed when we first got them due to many technical issues with Apple but they do a damn good job and are just about the perfect spec for a designer. Our Mac’s are connected to 27” 4K LG screens which aren’t the ones official built by LG for Apple but in our opinion are better. Our Macs are connected via one USB C cable which charges, transfers data and carries the signal to the screen but the screens offer others possibilities for connection such as HDMI slots and also come in at half the price. With the Macs connected and held in desk stands we can no longer use the keys or trackpad so over time have accumulated the full suite of Apple gizmos – Magic mouse, wireless keyboard, and trackpad. For us currently, this is our dream set up it offers the portability of a Mac book pro but with the set up of an iMac.
Storage
Anyone that runs there owns a business will know that you accumulate a lot of important stuff but stuff you don’t really know what to do with – finance paperwork, tax forms, insurance paperwork blah blah blah. It wasn’t something we really considered when we started the business but good storage is important. It’s nice to have everything packed away but you never know when you might need it. In all honestly our storage is nothing fancy but does a good job, it’s children bedroom furniture from Ikea. Yes, you did read that correctly, but it was cheap and the perfect size for what we wanted. The cupboards are filled with really useful boxes that allow papers to be stored in an organised fashion and keeps everything from getting damaged. We also have an Alex set of draws for all our printing paper and a kallax storage unit for books and other bits and pieces.
Bits, bobs and artwork
The office is jam-packed with bits, bobs, and artwork that shows our quirks and obsession for all things space or robot themed including our own items that are available over on our store. We also have framed artwork from Tom Pigeon that was recently joined by two prints from the Birmingham design festival (so recently they’re not in the images). It’s all the bits and pieces that really make the studio feel like ours and is what people comment on most when they walk in.