15 Awesome Gift Ideas for Designers

15 Awesome Gift Ideas for Designers

“A friendship can weather most things and thrive in thin soil; but it needs a little mulch of letters and phone calls and small, silly presents every so often – just to save it from drying out completely.”

– Pam Brown

Buying gifts is hard. Sometimes, no matter how well you know a person, it just seems like there’s nothing left in the world to get him or her. This is especially true for creative people, such as designers.

Creative people are quirky and they see the world in a different way, so to speak; it comes with the territory. That means that your average bottle of wine or semi-fancy pen just will not do. To buy a designer a gift, you need to thinks like a designer thinks, namely outside the box.

Being a design blog, we come into contact with all sorts of cool things, so we thought we could help you out in your quest for the perfect gift for a designer.

In this article, we will be showing you a list of some of coolest gift ideas we have come across lately, so you won’t have to stare blankly at the screen, thinking up search terms for Google.

Also, if you too are a designer, you might find something you want to get yourself because, as we have mentioned in a previous article, giving yourself a small gift everyday can really improve your happiness.

1. CMYK Playing Cards

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CMYK, in case you have not realized, stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black, and it is a subtractive color model, used in color printing. Each of these colors are represented in 10 different shades, in the pack, that shows the opacity level of each color, making them a fantastic gift for the designer (or designers) in your life.

2. Polaroid Z2300 10MP Digital Instant Print Camera

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Polaroid has been out of style for a fair amount of time, after digital cameras kind of made them obsolete. But in a quite brilliant move, Polaroid adapted its “instant short” selling point to the digital era. The Digital Instant Print Camera is exactly what a Polaroid camera was, only digital.

3. Typodarium 2014

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A calendar seems like a pretty boring gift to give someone, but you would be amazed what a bit of imagination can do.

Typodarium is calendar that showcases 365 typefaces from more than 200 designers and foundries from across the world, making it a fantastic gift for your type-obsessed designer friend.

4. The Advertisement Concept Book

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Written by Pete Barry, who currently is a professor in New York, and who used to work at Oglivy London, this book is all about the importance of concept. If you want to get a serious gift, instead of a funny one, then this is definitely it.

5. Field Notes

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Made to look like 30’s American agricultural memo books, Field Notes is about as retro as you can get. They come in a variety of shapes and colors, so you can choose the right one for the right person, and it is the perfect gift for someone who is tired of his plain, bland notebook.

6. Lifetrons Multi-Tool Limited Edition Lightning Adapter USB Sync and Charge High Tech

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The Swiss Army Knife of Gadgets, this multi-tool has everything from a whole array of USB jacks, to a stand for any kind of smartphone, and everything in between. Great for tech-savvy creatives.

7. The Nifty MiniDrive

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MacBooks, like most Apple technology, is not really open to users tinkering with it. This can be especially annoying if you find you have less space on your hard-drive than you would have actually needed.

The Nifty MiniDrive is a superbly easy solution to this problem. What it is is a miniature hard-disk, that can hold up to 128GB of extra space, which you can put in your MacBooks SD slot.

8. London Design Guide

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For designers going to London, this might just be the perfect gift. The book contains more than 150 locations -both new, and established- where people can get their design fix. This includes retailers, galleries, museums and bookshops, and each entry is reviewed and categorized.

9. Chevron iPad Sleeve

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Made out of organic bamboo, this hippie-looking iPad sleeve looks absolutely gorgeous, and we are willing to wager that you can use with other things, other than iPad’s or tablets. However, if used with what it was intended for, it can be used both with and without the Apple Smart Case/Cover.

10. Fitbit Aria

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A seems like an odd gift, perhaps even insulting, but the fact that it is a “smartscale” makes it cool, rather than offensive. If your designer friend is also a health enthusiast, than he will love this gift on several levels. Aside from looking awesome, the scale also weight, body mass percentage and BMI, uploading them them via WI-FI to Fitbit, so you can track your progress from any device.

11. iBell iPhone Alarm Clock

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Funny and nostalgic, the iBell is a great little “add-on” for the iPhone. It acts like a stand, that also charges your phone if connected to a AC adapter, and works in tandem with a free app you can get. It also comes in a iBell Mini variant, but the stand is definitely the cooler one.

12. Cordies

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Simple and good-looking, all at once, Cordies is a self-styled “desktop manager” that helps keep all your cords on the table, instead of always having to crouch or bend-over after them. Also, they look adorable!

13. Hue Wireless Lightbulbs

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Custom LED lighting that lets you create what kind of mood you want. This is the kind of weird gift that gets you noticed.

14. Doxie

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Doxie is a portable scanner, powered via USB. It scans directly to a cloud app of your choosing, and can create PDF files on your desktop. All and all, really cool for the designer on the go.

15. Sensu Solo Paintbrush

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We really think we saved the best for last here. The Sensu Solo Paintbrush is, essentially, a stylus, but it acts like a paintbrush, allowing the user to interact with any capacitive screen device as if it were a canvas.

That about wraps up our list of gifts for designers. We hope you found what you were looking for, and that whoever gets it really loves it.

Don’t forget to leave us your thoughts, as well as sharing any other cool gifts you can think of, in the comment section below.

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