I have worked with quite a few designers as part of my day job, but I have never had the pleasure of working with Sebastiaan de With. That doesn’t mean I haven’t admired the stuff he has designed over the past few years. I need to find a project he and I can do before some wise corporation snatches him up.
Who are you and what do you do?
I’m Sebastiaan de With. I spend most of my days designing icons and interfaces for large and small companies, from Mac / iPhone indie developers to Apple itself. Sometimes I spend a day recording some gameplay videos and put them up on my Youtube channel, and others I work on personal projects like Icon Resource.
What apps do you jump between most during the day?
I’m always jumping between Photoshop, Finder, Mail, Safari, Twitter and iChat. I’d say when I am in full crunch mode, iChat and Twitter are the first to leave. I do a lot of research during my work so Safari remains open all the time.
What app is your secret weapon/essential?
Quicksilver. Apparently barely any designer knows its power. After having output a bunch of icon mockups or UI comps, I just drill into the directory or drag the file(s) into Quicksilver, and with just a few keystrokes I have a bunch of scaled, high quality jpegs, or PNGs, and with another few keystrokes they’re sent off to the client, uploaded and filed. It’s incredibly powerful in any design workflow.
What app doesn’t exist that should to fill a void for you?
All of Photoshop’s shape layer / layer effects based editing in a more stable, less bloated and more streamlined application. A tool for solid animated UI and physics prototyping (Quartz Composer and After Effects, my current mainstays, don’t cut it). A better video editor (Final Cut Pro X?).
Launchbar, Quicksilver, Alfred or…?
Quicksilver. Always Quicksilver.
Show Me Your Pixels is a recurring series on carpeaqua where developers, artists and other creatives from all walks of life share an at-work screenshot of their desktop. No minimalism. No cleanup. Just real-world work environments. You can view previous installments.