Design your way

For those of who work with, or even live with, graphic designers, finding the right gift can be a tricky process.

Gifts for graphic designers are so difficult to pick out because we are such picky people. Part of this is because they have learned to value precise placements of the elements around them and have found that everything needs to have a particular purpose.

After years of thinking this way, it bleeds over into all aspects of their lives. Everything in a graphic designer’s life is carefully curated to their tastes and sensibilities (if they can help it).

If you’re searching for a gift for a graphic designer, you’re probably finding it quite a challenge. We’ve assembled a list of some cool gifts for graphic designers to help you out! Taste can be unique to every individual person, but most graphic designers have common interests. These gifts will appeal to their sense of visual balance, usefulness, and be pretty cool on top of all that.

Moleskine Smart Notebook

The Moleskine Smart Notebook is one of the best gift ideas for graphic designers. It allows the user to create SVG files from their sketches.

By using special markings on the pages as well as its special app designed to optimize the process, it makes the time between sketching out a design idea and its full realization much shorter. This great gift idea helps reduce the effort it takes for the graphic designer to get to the truly fun and profitable parts of their job.

Blue LED Wooden Alarm Clock

This alarm clock is both functional and beautiful! It is both touch and voice activated. It has a simple design and a lovely wooden finish. Along with the blue LED lights, it is one of the most stylish digital clocks out there.

Plus, it is very budget friendly, coming in at $21 or less from most retailers. It will also tell the temperature, making it good for any busy professional who needs to know if they should grab a jacket.

POP Desk Smartphone Handset

This is a great gift idea for a graphic designer who enjoys the retro look. This phone handset has some great old school style and a professional feel. It is compatible with most smartphones, provided they have a headphone jack (Bluetooth only users are out of luck).

It will work in standard phone mode and also works for voice calls being made using Skype. It’s a great and fun gift that works for most budgets, typically coming in at $47 from most retailers. If you’ve got a graphic designer in your life who likes the retro look, this is one of those great graphic designer gifts!

Travel Tag Prints

This is a great design gift for anyone who travels. It comes from Neil Stevens, who has assembled a really amazing range of beautiful A3 poster that were inspired by travel tags.

They feature destinations from all over the world depicted in a beautiful vintage style that looks really great just about anywhere. It is both retro and modern, perfect for anyone who wants a touch of their travel on their home walls.

Groovemade iPhone Cases and More

Groovemade has made a really great line of lovely wooden cases and other accessories for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

They have been “built the hard way” and you can tell from their excellent quality and look. If you find it hard to pick the right one as a gift for a graphic designer, Groovemade offers gift cards so you don’t have to worry about selecting just the right case.

Wacom Intuous

If you don’t practice design as a hobby or a job, you might not know that designing with a computer mouse can be tedious and limiting. Fortunately, there are other options that work much better, like the Wacom Intuous.

It works really well and is great for a designer who is looking to make great looking digital doodles, illustrations, and lettering.

Creative Market Gift Card

Graphic designers are always looking for resources to add to their designs. Creative Market is a huge marketplace where many different designers showcase and sell what they’ve made for the use of others. They feature textures, patterns, fonts, templates, and more. There are more than 110,000 wonderful design resources on Creative Market.

Getting a gift card for Creative Market is a great gift idea for designers. You can purchase gift cards that range from $20 to $100. They also work well as gifts for those “oops, I forgot” moments, since Creative Market gift cards can be emailed in mere moments.

Affinity Designer

The Affinity Designer software is looking to be the smoothest, fastest, and most precise vector graphic design software you can find. It works for just about every aspect of design, from UI design to Icon Design to even allowing for the creation of full works of art.

The team behind affinity Designer is trying to get rid of the need for multiple design apps and the tedious process of creating, exporting, and re-opening it edit in another app. This process is a pain for any designer. Removing it makes Affinity Designer a great gift for graphic designers. It’s also not going to break your budget, coming in at $39, making it an incredibly accessible gift (and tool) for a designer.

4-Port Aluminum USB Hub

We all have a lot of gadgets. Sometimes finding enough USB ports is a real problem. Fortunately, if you’re looking for great gifts for graphic designers, there is this 4-port aluminum USB hub.

It not only gives you extra slots that will work great with most Apple computers, it also looks really great. This makes it a great gift for designers who might not enjoy the clunky, ugly look of many USB port hubs on the market.

Crop It Like It’s Hot

This is a fun and playful t-shirt that’s a great gift idea for a designer with a sense of humor. It’s even better if the designer you have in mind likes Snoop Dog and Pharrell Williams.

The simplicity and humor can mean a lot to a designer who spends their time surrounded by software and gadgets. This t-shirt is 90% cotton and only costs $24, making it a good budget choice for office Christmas parties or even forgotten birthdays.

Browser Sketch Pad

If you know a web designer, they will be grateful when you give them this Browser Sketch Pad. It comes with the grid already on it, as well as the browser.

This makes it much easier for a web designer to sketch out new ideas and get a clear vision of what the final product will work out. It will save time and effort since it is so much easier to design on a wireframe. It’s only $16 for a 50 sheet pad and a whole lot of gratitude from the web designer you give it to.

Chalk Board Mug

Everyone needs caffeine, especially in the busy and frantic world of design. This chalkboard coffee mug is cute and clever, not only offering a way for a designer to get their caffeine fix but also express their creativity.

It can be redone to reflect whatever the mood of the day is or even become a useful design tool in a pinch. It is sure to catch the eyes of everyone at the office, especially if they are other designers. It’s also very budget friendly, coming in at around $ or less.

Philips Wake-Up Light

Waking up is hard for just about everyone, especially if you have to put in long hours the night before. This wake-up light makes it much easier. It is designed to imitate sunlight to gently wake you up in a natural way. It also provides an FM radio or your choice of wake-up sounds.

This is all backed by science, of course, and is going to help you or anyone you give it to have a better, calmer morning. It’s a great gift for a graphic designer, who tend to work long hours or be natural night owls.

3Doodler

This is an amazing little tool that is one of the great gifts for graphic designers out there. It allows people to draw in 3D! You can quickly sketch out ideas with his pen, allowing for even better visualization.

Or you can just create fun little models because you can! It’s actually much cheaper than it might seem, coming in at only $99. Check out its videos and some of the amazing things designers have made with this fantastic little tool! It’s a great gift for anyone interested in design, professionally or otherwise!

Letterpress Cookie Cutters

For anyone who wants to have some fun with type, there are these letterpress cookie cutters. Aren’t they cute? They’re also pretty handy when baking. They make type so good you can eat it!

These cookie cutters come with two sides, one for cutting cookies, another for pressing, so they’re useful for many other baking projects as well. You can use them to make fun cookie messages. Kids really enjoy them for this. If you know a designer who also likes baking, these make for a great gift that a whole family can enjoy together.

Sensu Artist Brush and Stylus

This great tool works on many different devices. It will make paintings made on a tablet or other mobile devices feel much more authentic than any other tool on the market. It offers you realistic, lifelike brush control hat you can’t find anywhere else.

It also comes with a secondary stylus nib that can be used when you don’t need the brush. It’s basically two devices in one, great for those who enjoy both painting and drawing. This is a very good gift for a designer from anyone on a budget since it runs just $40.

Clearcal Anti-Glare Film

If you or your designer friend are tired of seeing your own reflection on the screen, this anti-glare film has got your problem solved. Reflections can cause problems in truly seeing a design or even disrupt presentations during meetings with others working on a project.

This film will blur out and soften reflections while still keeping the screen crisp and clear. It retails at a budget-friendly $20. Get one for yourself and one as a gift for a graphic designer you know. Everyone will appreciate the effect this anti-glare film will have on their computer screen.

Smashing Books

This set of books comes from Smashing Magazine. They have been a very well-received collection of design-related books. They touch on just about every aspect of design, from mobile design to coding to freelancing to…well, everything.

It really is an amazing set of references that can be used now and in the future, allowing designers to brush up on the basics as well as develop new skills. You’ll find a great gift for a designer in this collection. They are available as either hardcover physical books or eBooks for iOS, Kindle, or Nook.

Sketch App

From the great team at Bohemian Coding, Sketch 3 is the new and improved version of the powerful Sketch app. It has only been recently released. It looks to be largely aimed at UI designers, though it does have a wide and varied range of capabilities that will work for just about every designer.

This design app is only growing in popularity. It is a really solid alternative to Adobe for the web, desktop, mobile, and icon design. Any designer will be more than happy to receive Sketch App as a gift!

LaMetric Dashboard and Speaker

This is a pretty cool device. It works in two ways. It will display fun live pixel notifications around anything you want, including emails, tasks, business metrics, news, alerts, and much more. It also functions as a speaker.

You can customize it however you want, having it display whatever you like from either your desktop computer or your mobile device. It’s a fun and playful gift for a designer that also can be very useful. It’s on the more expensive side, at $199, so be sure to give it to someone special. It is a great Christmas or birthday gift.

Tile: Never Lose Anything Again

This nifty little device can be attached to any item you don’t want to lose. It can be something important like your wallet or phone or just something that you keep losing. If the item the Tile is attached to goes missing, use the tile app to track it down.

It will even have the Tile play a sound to help you find it. If the item goes missing farther away or is really stolen, Tile uses a network of apps to help you locate it. It is a great gift idea for designers or anyone, especially if they have a habit of losing their keys.

NomadKey

This device allows you to always have a charging cable on hand but makes sure you don’t have to carry the entire wire. It fits easily in your pocket and can be kept on a keyring.

With NomadKey, you’ll never have to worry about whether or not you have your charger on you again. It’s so small and portable that you’ll probably forget you do have it when you need it! It makes for a great gift idea for graphic designers and just about anyone you know.

Olloclip

This is a wonderful clip-on lens for your iPhone camera. It gives the iPhone a 4-in-1 lens option without having to carry around a ton of different devices. It can capture up close macro images, wide-angle images, and even a fish-eye image.

This is a great tool for photographers on the go who want to be able to capture any photo that catches their fancy without having to carry around a large camera. Just clip it onto your iPhone and you can take the picture however you want. The possibilities are limitless.

Blackwing Pencils

These pencils have been voted as the best pencil out there officially by Design Island. Their slogan is “Half the pressure, twice the speed” and they live up to it. It’s easy to go through them very quickly, so even if you know someone who already uses them, a replacement box is a much-appreciated gift.

Give them with a nice, cool Moleskine notebook to make this gift something extra special. If you are looking for one of the best gift ideas for graphic designers, the Blackwing pencils are definitely one of them.

Desk Shelf System by Grovemade

Every workspace needs to be organized to be truly useful. For creative people, who work in frantic environments, it’s doubly important. These beautiful and useful shelves, stands, and accessories will fit the bill very nicely.

As Grovemade states on their website: “Our Desk Shelf System brings clarity and intention to your workspace. It gives you global control of clutter, and a place for everything you need to work.” This gift is sure to go over well with any designer you give it to, whether for their home office or their office at work.

Rainbow Chopsticks

For those late night sessions or just an order of Chinese for a busy day to the office, these rainbow chopsticks will make an impression. They’re fun and cool. Creative people will enjoy doing something different. It also means that the office won’t have to worry if the take-out place didn’t include utensils again!

Ending thoughts on gifts for graphic designers

There are many great gifts for graphic designers out there, ranging from tools they can use for work to helpful fun accessories. Take a look at this list and see if one of the gift ideas is the right one for your graphic design friends!

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