I keep thinking of a moment while watching a Casey Neistat video in ‘14 and seeing how creative and cool some of his early videos were and thinking I’d be a poor videographer, but I could probably make websites. So probably then.

Gotta love Casey! Back in my student days, I ‘splurged’ on his merch hoodie.

torrented cs2 master suite in elementary school and would make userbars on runescape private server forums. just like this: x.com/ilyamiskov/statu…

Ilya Miskov (@ilyamiskov) on X

You know you’re old when you started your design career making these.

x.com

then i never followed through 😂

Summer of 2012 when I was messing around with Photoshop CS2 making custom icons for jailbroken iPhones.

I taught myself photoshop at age 13-14 and started making forum signatures for my friends. I later saw other people charging money for this very service, calling it Graphic Design. And so I got to work 😈

I liked art in high school but preferred not to be a starving artist in front of my refugee parents, so I discovered graphic design as a great blend between art + tech. Then I discovered product design which was that plus more money.

designer? when I realized how fast I got bored of other academic lanes! digital product designer? when I learned just how expensive it was to live in Toronto.

During my time as an engineer, I found more joy in creating posters using Paint for the fun committee events than in my daily tasks.

learning html and css through tumblr ^__^

When I realized writing code while imagining how the website/software would look like was a pain in the ass and that there was this thing called UX/UI Design... It was a great relief!

When I figured out all I could do with my music history degree was teach music history 😅

Around the point (16? 17?) I realized I did not have the mental makeup to “do art” as a career, but still wanted to do something where I’d get to draw stuff from time to time ✍️

I knew since I was a kid! I had notebooks full of art, fashion and car designs 🥹☺️