thedeskspace

[thedeskspace]

Luis Sosa - Creative Director at More Starch

What do you do?

I’m the Co-Founder and Creative Director a Communication Studio in Mexico city called More Starch. We’re morbidly fascinated with how a good idea can be utterly useless unless it’s communicated well.So we’ve put our brains at the service of complimenting good ideas with “wrinkle-free communication.”

Where do you do it?

I work on old Chrome Aluminum and Formica table that i bought from a vintage furniture store. It has no drawers which can lead to clutter but i love being able to spread out. I recently added a little tray table underneath that’s done very little to control the mess. 

I sit on an original Knoll Saarinen Executive Chair

On my desk is a Dell P2715Q connected to a 2014 15″ Retina Macbook Pro with a 2.5 GHZ i7 Quad Core, 16 GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD drive docked in a Rain Design Vertical Dock. This thing is a ridiculously capable machine and feel little need to upgrade 3 years on although whenever I’m at a meeting and someone pulls out one of the new black 13″ macbook pros or the 12″ MacBooks I feel a twinge of envy at their lighter daily carry.

I have a Logitech C920 webcam

My mouse is a Logitech MX Master which replaced a Razer Adder (again trying to limit wires on my desk)

I’m still addicted to my mechanical switch Filco Ninja keyboard

My speakers are a pair of Kanto K2′s in matte black which sound fantastic

My desk is usually quite cluttered.

I recently purchased a pair of wireless Sony Noise Cancelation H.ear headphones which sound great and freed me of wires.

You can just spot a pair of open ear Grado SR80s hanging off my lamp which I occasionally use as well.

My black iPhone 6s + (128 GB) is usually sitting somewhere in view so I can catch notifications which i sometimes dock in a Twelve Rise dock.

I keep an original Marc Johns illustration framed on my desk to remind me to have a sense of humor about even the darker things.

An old Mariage Fréres tea tin serves as a pen, cable, random stuff holder

I use a Boogie Board to replace the endless stacks of post-its I’d go through for jotting down quick notes. I snap a picture of the board on my phone and that’s it.

and then there’s a myriad of nick nacks that I like fiddling with.

What's on your computers desktop?

The folders are mainly self explanatory and those that aren’t are mainly projects I’m working on, random saved files from games, occasionally a show I’m watching and “New Folder” where I unceremoniously dumped all the crap i had on my desktop whenever I get frustrated by the clutter.

My top menu bar has (from left to right

1. Telegram desktop app - I desperately wish more people would jump ship from iMessage and Whatsapp and just use telegram. It’s my favorite messaging app.

2. VyprVPN - One of the best VPN services I’ve found which still works with Netflix

3. Adobe Creative Cloud - a necessary evil. 

4. Karabiner Elements - A tiny app that let’s me remap the keys on my keyboard.

5. Dropbox - Personal cloud storage

6. Annotate - A fantastic screenshot annotation tool that was just purchased by Cloudapp. Here’s hoping they don’t fuck it up like Evernote did Skitch.

7. Magnet - A windows management tool that I just started using. Great for quick side by side comparisons

8. Duet - Let’s me use my iPad Pro as secondary monitor (I almost never use it)

9. Tweetbot - Best twitter client ever. So much so that whenever I see the native twitter client I gag a little. Tweetbot could use an update though. 

10. Battery - I use iStat Menu to get a smaller vertical battery. 

11. 1password - This has made my life SO MUCH EASIER. It allows for tracking of all my account passwords and syncs with the iOS app.

12. Fantastical 2 - A wonderful calendar app that lets me use natural language to set up appointments.

13. Unclutter - this app is fantastic. I put my mouse on the top edge of the menu bar, scroll down, and a little drawer pops out that has a note pad, and a file drawer. Very useful for the random stuff you need to keep close by. In theory this should help declutter my desktop

14. Google Drive - My company uses Google Apps for business so both our email and file sharing happens here.

15. Skiptunes - a great little app that gives me control of iTunes or Spotify in the menubar

16.  Cloudapp - One of the many cloud buckets I use to upload things when i need a quick weblink

17. Bartender - This app let’s me tuck away me less used menu apps into a tiny drawer. 

17-1. Keyboard viewer - Built in to macOS and allows me to access special characters like this ✪ 

17-2. Wunderlist - Great cross platform To-Do list app which allows for shareable list with task assignment.

17-3. Hazel - Hazel is like your mom running after you cleaning up your mess. It lets me create rules to automatically move and sort files. Mainly used to clear out old screenshots from my desktop. 

17-4. DayOne - a fantastic journaling app which I use on both my mac and my iOS devices.

17-5. Copied - Clipboard app with an IOS counterpart

17-6. Carbon Cloner - For automatic back up cloning of my hard drive. 

17-7. BackBlaze - Cloud based backup that gives me piece of mind that I won’t ever lose ANYTHING. 

17-8. Gfxcardstatus - For Macbook Pros with dual graphics cards this let me know which one my computer is using and force it to use the integrated GPU when I need to conserve battery life.

17-9. Quicksilver - This is spotlight before spotlight was invented. I’m by no means a power user but the integrated history and clip board makes quicksilver my preferred launcher over spotlight.

18. Bluetooth (to switch audio over to my Sony H.ear headphones)

19. Wifi

20. Airplay

20. Volume

21. Clock - 

21. Spotlight

22. Siri

23. Notification Center

What's on your computers dock?

Tweetbot - Again

Telegram - Again

iMessage - Because not enough people use Telegram

Whatsapp - This is one of the worst apps because it requires your phone to have a connection to whatsapp to work. Hate it but again a necessary evil. 

Slack - This has fundamentally changed how I run my creative studio. Fantastic app. 

Airmail - My email client of choice. I switched due to the vertical panes before Mac updated their mail client and now I’m used to it.

Chrome - Utterly dependent on the cross platform syncing.