Software I use, gadgets I love, and other things I recommend.

I often get asked about the tools I use to design, stay focused, or occasionally convince myself that rearranging my workspace counts as progress. Here’s a list of my favorite gear, software, and go-to essentials.

Workstation

  • 14” MacBook Pro, M4 Pro, 24GB RAM (2024)

    I went down from a 16” and have not looked back. The 14” form factor is the sweet spot: it disappears into a bag, the display is gorgeous, and the M4 Pro chews through Figma files, prototypes and three AI agents running at once without the fans ever making themselves known.

  • Apple Studio Display, nano-texture, tilt and height adjustable

    The main screen. Nano-texture because my desk faces a window and I would rather not design against my own reflection. The adjustable stand costs more than it should and is worth every rupee the first time you raise it to eye level and your neck says thank you.

  • LG C2 42” OLED

    Yes, a TV, as a second monitor. At 42” it is the size of a desk and the OLED blacks make dark-mode work look the way it is meant to. Prototypes, video calls and reference boards all live here while the Studio Display stays for the actual work.

  • Logitech MX Master 4

    The scroll wheel alone is the reason. Free-spin through a thousand-layer Figma file, click, and it stops dead. Once your thumb learns the gestures, every other mouse feels like it is missing a button.

  • Flowlyf standing desk

    I stand for the first hour and after lunch, which is exactly the two moments I would otherwise slump. It is quiet, it remembers two heights, and it has survived the LG being parked on it.

Everyday carry

  • iPhone 17 Pro Max, silver

    The big one, because most of what I design gets judged on a phone and I want to feel what a customer feels. Silver because it hides fingerprints and I stopped pretending I would ever use a case.

  • AirPods Pro 3

    In for calls, out for people, and the noise cancelling is now good enough that Bangalore traffic becomes a rumour. They pair with everything on this page without me thinking about it.

  • Whoop

    No screen, no notifications, just a strap that quietly tells me when I have been sleeping like a designer on a launch week. It has changed how I plan hard days more than any productivity app.

Entertainment

  • LG G5 65” OLED

    The big one is for games, not work. Wall mounted, 120Hz, and the kind of blacks that make a night level actually dark. It is the one screen in the house I refuse to put a spreadsheet on.

  • PlayStation 5

    My reset button. An hour on the PS5 does more for my judgment the next morning than an hour of extra work the night before, and the best studios are a masterclass in feedback, pacing and reward that I steal from shamelessly.

  • Apple TV 4K

    Runs on a separate 55” in the living room, mostly used by my wife.

AI and development

  • Claude Code

    My daily driver for building. It runs in the terminal, reads the whole project, and does what a very good engineer would do with a clear brief. This site was rebuilt and shipped with it.

  • ChatGPT

    The second opinion. When I want a different angle on a problem, or a draft torn apart before I show it to anyone, it goes here first.

  • Perplexity

    Search that answers instead of listing. Anything I would once have opened ten tabs for, from competitor pricing to how a regulation actually reads, starts here.

  • Cursor

    For when I want to see the code and shape it by hand. It is the editor I open when a prototype has outgrown a prompt.

  • iTerm2

    I’m honestly not even sure what features I get with this that aren’t just part of the macOS Terminal but it’s what I use.

Design

  • Figma

    We started using Figma as just a design tool but now it’s become our virtual whiteboard for the entire company. Never would have expected the collaboration features to be the real hook.

  • Cosmos

    Where inspiration goes so it does not die in a screenshots folder. A calm place to collect, and the algorithm surfaces things I would never have searched for.

  • Weave

    For the parts of design that are images, video and motion rather than screens. It has replaced a stack of single-purpose tools I no longer open.

Off the desk

  • Seiko Presage Cocktail Time, green dial

    The everyday watch. The dial does something different in every light, which is more than I can say for most interfaces, and it costs a fraction of what people assume.

  • Omega × Swatch MoonSwatch, Mission to the Moon

    The Speedmaster’s face in grey Bioceramic, light enough to forget it is on. It borrows a design that has stayed right for sixty years, a reminder that getting it right the first time keeps paying off.

  • Golden Goose, high tops and lows

    The high tops most days, the low ones with the black heel tab when it is warm. They arrive pre-scuffed, which saves me the trouble of worrying about them.

Library

What’s on my shelves at home, design and otherwise, stacked from shortest to tallest.

  1. The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman
  2. Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug
  3. Thinking with Type by Ellen Lupton
  4. Grid Systems in Graphic Design by Josef Müller-Brockmann
  5. Interaction of Color by Josef Albers
  6. The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst
  7. Designing Design by Kenya Hara
  8. Ways of Seeing by John Berger
  9. About Face by Alan Cooper
  10. The Shape of Design by Frank Chimero
  11. Org Design for Design Orgs by Merholz & Skinner
  12. Articulating Design Decisions by Tom Greever
  13. Just Enough Research by Erika Hall
  14. Mismatch by Kat Holmes
  15. Sprint by Jake Knapp
  16. Inspired by Marty Cagan
  17. The Making of a Manager by Julie Zhuo
  18. Creative Confidence by Tom & David Kelley
  19. Laws of UX by Jon Yablonski
  20. Shape Up by Ryan Singer
  21. Wyrd Sisters by Terry Pratchett
  22. One Shot by Lee Child
  23. Ancestral Vices by Tom Sharpe
  24. The Story of the World in 100 Moments by Neil Oliver
  25. Beach Read by Emily Henry
  26. Book Lovers by Emily Henry
  27. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
  28. A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
  29. Everything Is F*cked by Mark Manson
  30. The Little Book of More Calm Colouring by Sinden & Kay
  31. Spanish Phrase Book by DK
  32. French Visual Phrase Book by DK
  33. Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl
  34. everybody lies by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
  35. A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz
  36. The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion
  37. Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez
  38. Roots by Alex Haley
  39. The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel
  40. The Aunts Omnibus by P. G. Wodehouse
  41. Way of the Wolf by Jordan Belfort
  42. What If? by Randall Munroe
  43. 50 Greatest Short Stories by Rupa
  44. The Bombay Prince by Sujata Massey
  45. Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard P. Feynman
  46. Winning Way by Anita & Harsha Bhogle
  47. The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker
  48. Born to Run by Christopher McDougall
  49. How to Kill Men and Get Away With It by Katy Brent
  50. A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman
  51. The Women Who Forgot to Invent Facebook by Nisha Susan
  52. Newborns and New Moms by Dr Farah Adam Mukadam
  53. The Sweet Spot by Paul Bloom
  54. The Ultimate Mathematical Challenge by UK Mathematics Trust
  55. The Master by Christopher Clarey
  56. Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss
  57. Alone on the Wall by Alex Honnold
  58. Becoming Steve Jobs by Schlender & Tetzeli
  59. Why Design Matters by Debbie Millman
  60. Sapiens: A Graphic History by Yuval Noah Harari
  61. The Dark Arena by Mario Puzo
  62. Less by Andrew Sean Greer
  63. Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less by Jeffrey Archer
  64. Great Suspense Stories by Ruskin Bond
  65. The Hippopotamus by Stephen Fry
  66. It’s Not About the Bike by Lance Armstrong
  67. Tea Time for the Traditionally Built by Alexander McCall Smith
  68. Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari
  69. My Life in Full by Indra Nooyi
  70. How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid
  71. Nujeen by Nujeen Mustafa
  72. Lust & Other Stories by Susan Minot
  73. The Complete Adventures of Feluda by Satyajit Ray
  74. The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams
  75. Teach Yourself to Think by Edward de Bono
  76. Yellowface by Rebecca F. Kuang
  77. People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry
  78. All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
  79. The Communication Book by Krogerus & Tschäppeler
  80. Creative Selection by Ken Kocienda
  81. Mastery by Robert Greene
  82. The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith
  83. When I Stop Talking, You’ll Know I’m Dead by Jerry Weintraub
  84. Annihilation of Caste by B. R. Ambedkar
  85. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
  86. The Theory of Everything by Stephen W. Hawking
  87. The Vendor of Sweets by R. K. Narayan
  88. This Book May Save Your Life by Dr Karan Rajan
  89. Design Is Storytelling by Ellen Lupton
  90. Management Mantras by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
  91. Simple, Not Easy by Raj Ganpath
  92. The Bachelor of Arts by R. K. Narayan
  93. Heated Rivalry by Rachel Reid
  94. Factfulness by Hans Rosling
  95. Start with Why by Simon Sinek
  96. Three Bags Full by Leonie Swann
  97. Selected Short Stories by Saadat Hasan Manto
  98. The Mouse Charmers by Anuradha Goyal
  99. A Murder on Malabar Hill by Sujata Massey
  100. Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers by Jesse Q. Sutanto
  101. This Handmade Life by Nandita Iyer
  102. The Authenticity Project by Clare Pooley
  103. The Travelling Cat Chronicles by Hiro Arikawa
  104. Rhythmanalysis by Henri Lefebvre
  105. The Unusual Billionaires by Saurabh Mukherjea
  106. Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder
  107. The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green
  108. One Up on Wall Street by Peter Lynch
  109. Asura by Anand Neelakantan
  110. The Jeeves Omnibus 3 by P. G. Wodehouse
  111. Select Editions by Reader’s Digest
  112. Diamonds in the Dust by Saurabh Mukherjea
  113. 3 Rays by Satyajit Ray
  114. The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick
  115. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child by J. K. Rowling
  116. The Pocket Rumi by Rumi
  117. Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
  118. The Elements of Style by Strunk and White
  119. Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
  120. Anxious People by Fredrik Backman
  121. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
  122. The Secret of Leadership by Prakash Iyer
  123. A Childhood in Malabar by Kamala Das
  124. An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth by Chris Hadfield
  125. Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
  126. Cleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco Mellors
  127. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender
  128. Perfect Parenting by Sushant Kalra
  129. Statistics Without Tears by Derek Rowntree
  130. Seeing Like a Feminist by Nivedita Menon
  131. The Joy of x by Steven Strogatz
  132. Emotional Design by Don Norman
  133. Hippie by Paulo Coelho
  134. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson
  135. Deep Work by Cal Newport
  136. That Will Never Work by Marc Randolph
  137. Patterns of India by Christine Chitnis
  138. Great Modern Artists by Pankhurst & Hawksley
  139. Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before? by Dr Julie Smith
  140. Escaping the Build Trap by Melissa Perri
  141. Speculative Everything by Dunne & Raby
  142. Cues by Vanessa Van Edwards
  143. The Laws of Human Nature by Robert Greene
  144. The Design Thinking Toolbox by Lewrick, Link & Leifer
  145. The Design Thinking Playbook by Lewrick, Link & Leifer
  146. The Concise 33 Strategies of War by Robert Greene
  147. Art Matters by Neil Gaiman & Chris Riddell
  148. Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore
  149. Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
  150. The Almanack of Naval Ravikant by Eric Jorgenson
  151. tiny experiments by Anne-Laure Le Cunff
  152. India: A History by John Keay