I had some time off from work for the holidays, so I’ve been catching up on other stuff. In particular, I’ve been rearranging my office for the past couple of days.

I unpacked my Canon Pixma iP6600D printer and realized that it’s probably the oldest still-functional device in my office. Out of nostalgia, I went and fished out some old photos of the various office setups I’ve had over the years.

2007

There’s the printer, a tiny 1280×720 15″ monitor, plus a mouse and keyboard, connected to my old Gateway desktop PC.

I can’t get over how barebones that setup is. Mind you, that was half of the office–the other half fit into a backpack and included a Gateway convertible notebook, a scanner, a portable Canon Pixma iP90v printer, and a bunch of other stuff.

2009

We moved to a new place in 2009, and the room I was using as an office was so tiny that we had to refurnish it in order to find a place for my stuff to go. I used IKEA’s 3D planner and a lot of catalog surfing to come up with a way to make as much use of the much smaller space as possible.

Same PC, display, and printer, new furniture.

2013

2013 played hell on my workspace arrangements. I was juggling several part-time jobs doing papercraft design, freelance graphic design, web development, and a motley variety of odd jobs during 2012, none of which really needed a dedicated workspace of their own. In 2013, however, I took a huge detour into full-time video game development after a successful Kickstarter project.

The first change was making room for a bunch of new development hardware, including an enormous and powerful Shift workstation furnished by Maingear, one of the sponsors of The Gallery: Six Elements.

And it grew…

And kept growing…

…until it completely dominated nearly half of my office space, displacing almost everything else into the closet or storage. Printers, hobby cutters, laminators, cutting mats, nothing was safe from the voracious appetite of the ever-growing video game development beast.

Until this week, when I finally had enough time off to turn the rest of my office into productive and usable workspace for other pursuits!

2014

I got a 21.5″ iMac in December, which runs both OS X and Windows. It’s dedicated to OS X and iOS development, graphic design, papercraft design, web development, and entertainment. In setting it up, we come right back to the beginning of this blog post. The Canon Pixma iP6600D that I received in 2006 as a gift from Mrs E is still trucking, and it’s back on the job.

I find the fact that it color coordinates so well with the brand new iMac hilarious. It’s like that printer never goes out of style. I’m planning to move my venerable Craft ROBO cutter under the riser below the printer, where the black wire basket is.

I relocated the webcam boom stand to the corner, between the 2 tables, and artfully positioned my shredder in front of it, at a 45 degree angle. The table on the right is for general home office stuff, like paperwork.

I also cleared out a bunch of crap from under the tables and re-homed it. I now have an empty 50″ closet table to work with, which I want to deck out with some riser shelves and a couple of lamps. That’ll give me a proper hobby workspace again, which I’ll cover in another blog post!