Why I do this.

I grew up wanting to be an illustrator. That was the plan through art school. It never fully went away. It just started walking alongside product design instead of ahead of it.

The shift started during an internship, illustrating for a government platform on drug prevention and harm reduction for affected families. I was not designing interfaces yet. I was using one: an institutional blog that fought me at every click. I felt the problem before I had the words for it.

After graduating I moved through marketing agencies and freelance clients, and the same problem kept showing up. Confusing flows. Unclear hierarchy. Contrast nobody had checked. I started studying UX and UI seriously: articles, books, masterclasses, mentorships, alongside enough front-end code to know what I was actually asking developers to build.

Design is not a hobby I clock out of. I use a computer and a phone all day for work, so a confusing flow or a broken hierarchy is not an abstract problem. It is friction I run into personally, and that keeps the irritation, and the interest, alive.

Build a solid foundation before the house goes up.

That idea stuck with me. I watched smaller companies start adopting design systems and realized one decision, made well and made once, can speed up an entire team while making the product easier to use. That is still the trade I find worth making.

Since then the work has gotten more complex, and more accountable: real clients, real constraints, results that have to hold up outside a Figma file.