I don't really enjoyed multi monitor as turned out

As a graphic designer, it's pretty common to open multiple apps and windows. Windows Explorer, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign, Edge web browser, Spotify, Whatsapp Desktop, to name a few, are several apps that constantly running everyday in my desktop. Having the luxury using 3 monitors (2 monitor and 1 Wacom One pen display) may be an awesome feeling.

But actually not.

I do not enjoy it for most of the time. It is hassle, sometimes distracting, and not productive. It is hassle, because my mouse now needs to reach a quite large space of screen. Sometimes, the cursor is hidden and you need to find it for a moment. It is distracting, because there's a lot of thing going on in front of my eye. Mails, notifications, music playlist, even some attractive pictures on Pinterest, can easily cause distraction. Having just one screen to look at, I feel like I can put my whole attention to it. Even if I open multiple apps, I can just focus on one.

But there's one thing that multiple screen is important, at least for me as a graphic designer. That is doing some layout design and some small financing stuff, where I constantly needs to see documents and the working app at the same time. I find it cumbersome to only use one screen for this. Having multiple screen, now I can work in Screen 1, while see the document reference in screen 2. That is where the thing got easier with multiple screen.

Photo by Nikolay on Unsplash

For doing digital art, even though it is cool to have second monitor for viewing reference you see on Pinterest or Artstation, I find them a bit more distracting than helping significantly. I feel a bit more distracted to see more beautiful images than actually doing the work. Working for a digital art, logo or flyers, I feel more focused if only using 1 screen.

You may say the distraction occurs due to me cannot focus well, you might be right. But it is no denying that by omitting the things that distracting to gain more focus, while it also doesn't hurt anything, works so well for me.

Then if you ask me, should you use multiple screen for graphic design or just stick with one. I will say, go with multiple screen. It is nice to have, cool for you desktop looks, and sometimes gets pretty helpful. But beware of distraction. If you think it's distracting to use multiple monitors at once, using only one does not hurt at all. Having two monitors is definitely better than one, but using only the one for particular jobs does not matter at all.