I went from drawing comics over animating Flash Cartoons to designing and developing websites, landing my first freelance gigs as a teenager. After high school, I studied communication design. Here I intensified my interest in typography, and made a lot of valuable connections that led to an exciting internship and more freelance gigs. By the time I got my degree, my design jobs were already covering my rent and bills.

As I’m moving between different disciplines, my responsibilities shift depending on the project. They can involve visualizing ideas or capturing and creating a certain mood, but they can also be about making tools more usable.

It can be challenging for me to let ideas go or accept that there’s not enough time or budget to explore a direction I see potential in more deeply.

Depending on the nature of a project, my main design tool is either Figma, or a code editor. Or Glyphs, in case I’m working on a typeface.

I rarely use Figma in its full capacity, it’s more of a digital sketchbook for me most of the time, accompanying the analog one. The more systematic and structured design phase usually happens in a code editor.

Try to incorporate your interests into your work, use inspiration to your advantage. You don’t have to do things the way other people do. Listen to your intuition.

There were a few phases where I focused on the wrong things and became unhappy — following paths that weren’t right for me or simply taking work too seriously and letting it take over my life. But in the end, I feel I learned from those moments and managed to turn things around, at least so far.

I think what keeps me inspired is staying interested in things outside of my work, or at least in things that don’t have an obvious connection to my work at first glance. Lettings these things find their influence back into my work keeps things interesting.