Why I use a Wacom tablet for product design
Illustrations or some photo retouching. It makes sense to use a pressure sensitive graphics tablet. But for product design or UX design, I didn’t meet anyone yet using one for it. Here are my reasons, Why I use a Wacom tablet for product design.
How I got started
When I started my career as a graphic designer. I thought it looked cool to use a Wacom tablet. Made you feel like a designer instantly. So I started to use it. I wasn’t doing much painting or retouching on photoshop. But work with vectors on Adobe illustrator. Very soon it became a essential tool for my work.
Why I use a Wacom tablet
I can work longer without wrist pain.
UX design and product design could have demanding hours. If you work all day moving your mouse cursor around. And clicking here and there like a pro gamer. The long hours adds up. But with a wacom tablet, the angle you grab the pen, you’ll notice less strain on your wrist. If your suffering for Carpal tunnel syndrome, I suggest you try.
It’s fast
Now I feel so slow on a mouse. If you compare a mouse click verse a small tap with the pen, it’s quick and has less movement. Also I can move fast around the screen with high precision.
But some disadvantages
- It takes your space on your desktop.
- You need a desk to use it. No designing on a couch.
- It’s bad if your using multiple screens. I set my tablet area to only my main screen. And use a extra mouse for multiple screens
- It’s not cheap.
My setup
I downgraded to basic Intuos
I use to use a mid size wacom intuos pro. But now use small size intuos(CTL-4100). Why did I downgrade? The mid size version of the intuos pro takes up a big portion of your desk.
The base version got better
The base version got better. I also owned an old Wacom bamboo tablet. I cannot use it anymore since the driver isn’t supported anymore for recent macos versions. And pen was pretty bad compared to the intuos pro.
The recent version(Intuos CTL-4100) has a nice enough pen. Though the pen is slightly thin. It has more pressure sensitivity than before. The tablet area has less bezels, which makes it very small. Best of all it’s cheap.
Wacom for product design. Working with Sketch and Figma
Wacom tablet works fine with Sketch or Figma. Selection of layers is fast and easy. And as mentioned earlier, I don’t have wrist pain when working long hours. I know it helps with the pain, cause when I use a mouse the whole day, I get pain on my wrists.
So if you can resist the urge to work on couch. I recommend you try a graphics tablet out.
