I didn't start as a product designer. I started as an artist.

Growing up, I was the kid who couldn't walk past a texture without wanting to touch it, couldn't enter a room without noticing how the light hit the walls. I spent hours mixing oil pastels, rearranging compositions, obsessing over colour relationships that nobody else seemed to notice. For a long time I assumed my future lived somewhere between a fine art studio and an interior design firm. I was happy with that.

Then something shifted.

I started thinking about impact: not the kind you hang on a gallery wall, but the kind that touches someone on an ordinary Tuesday. The kind that lives in the things people use every day. Back then, digital interaction design barely had a name. There were only a handful of universities in the world offering it as a graduate programme. I found one, packed up everything I knew about craft and composition, and walked into a field that was still figuring out what it was.

What followed was one of the best decisions I've ever made and also the beginning of a long negotiation between the artist I was and the designer I was becoming.

The work taught me things no programme could. I was lucky to spend my career alongside people who each brought something different to the table: strategists who thought in systems, engineers who thought in constraints, researchers who thought in humans. Every collaboration added a layer. The artist in me learned to argue for beauty inside a product roadmap. The designer in me learned that a well-timed insight can move a business faster than a perfectly crafted screen.

I'm still negotiating. Deep down I still care about colour, composition, and the way something feels in your hands, even when the only metric on the dashboard is attention. On weekends I paint with oil pastels, run a community for people building creative lives outside their day jobs, write about product design, and journal my swing trading process.