Sayed Essam

Multidisciplinary Product Designer focused on creating memorable digital experiences

Issue #311 June 14, 2023

About

Sayed Essam (Syd) is a product designer focused on creating. Born and raised in Egypt, he knew that design was his passion from an early age.

He is currently a Senior Product Designer at MoneyHash and is also mentoring other designers adplist.org.

My Macintosh-style watch charger stand, I’ve searched for a stand for it for 3 years and none looked good or functioned as I wanted it to, till I found this stand which turns the watch into nightstand mode and I can glance at it for the clock and looks like a little retro Macintosh on my desk.

Photos

14 images

Gear

24 items

Desk IKEA Bekant Desk Buy

Accessories IKEA Bekant Side Table

Monitor Arm LG Ultrafine 5K Display (on a VIVO monitor arm) Buy

Monitor Baseus Screen LED Bar Buy

Computer MacBook Pro M1 Pro 14’ (Main workhorse, attached with one cable ready to go)

Tablet iPad Pro 12.9’ with Apple Pencil (on a flexible stand from Amazon)

Monitor KRK Rokit 5 Studio Monitor Speakers Buy

Speakers Focusrite Scarlet 2i2 Audio Interface (hidden under the monitor stand) Buy

Accessories Scarlet Studio Mic (on a Rode Mic Arm hidden behind the display)

Monitor ELLOVEN Monitor Stand Buy

Accessories Seagate 12TB External Drive Buy

Desk Mat Woven Desk Mat from Amazon

Keyboard Logitech MX Keys Mini Buy

Mouse Logitech MX Master 3 Buy

Mouse Apple Magic Trackpad

Accessories MagSafe Charger (with aluminum stand from Amazon)

Accessories Mahogany Teakwood High Intensity Candle from Bath&Body Works

Accessories IKEA Fake Plant

Accessories Macintosh-style Apple Watch Charger Stand Buy

Chair Cooler Master Ergo L Chair‍ Buy

Accessories 2 Pegboards from IKEA that I painted black and hanged all my other tech gadgets and photography needs.‍

Keyboard A big shelf to host all my camera and model cars collections along with some posters.‍

Accessories Coffee corner that hosts all the tools and needs for making coffee.

Accessories I live in a small apartment so I had to optimize all my work needs into a small accessible space.

The census

Sayed’s LG UltraFine 5K is on 7% of the desks we’ve published.

Ranked across all 516 setups that list their gear.

MacBook Pro 64%

Apple Magic Trackpad 18%

Logitech MX Master 3 9%

LG UltraFine 5K 7%

See top 50 gear items ›

Software

7 apps

Figma for everything work related and sometimes more (I made my wedding invitation on Figma!)

Cron for calendar

Arc browser lately

Spotify for music since 2014

Lightroom for photo editing

Semplice for portfolio and website

Final Cut Pro for video editing

Interview

3 questions

› What do you think is the main benefit of remote work?

I think remote work enabled a lot of people (beside giving back a lot of commute time back to them) to do different stuff beside their work that they wouldn’t normally do. Like ever since Covid and I have started to take care of my desk setup and improve it one by one till I reached this setup, and actually started to make content with (and planning to, so this is a sneak peak). Check my Instagram for more.

› What’s next to the desk?

2 Pegboards from IKEA that I painted black and hanged all my other tech gadgets and photography needs.

› What’s behind the desk?

Coffee corner that hosts all the tools and needs for making coffee. I live in a small apartment so I had to optimize all my work needs into a small accessible space.