I always knew I wanted to explore my passion for art. When I started, I wasn't even aware of the different career paths available to me; I just wanted to create. Thinking about a career came much later and definitely involved a lot of experimentation.

The reason I became a designer is simple: I wanted to continue creating. Design has a funny way of finding its way back to you. When you dedicate your time, focus, and love to something, people notice, and often they help guide you along the way.

Experimentation has been a huge part of my journey. After all, if you don't try different things, how will you discover what you truly enjoy and what doesn't resonate with you as a creative outlet? Exploring illustration, motion, and UI wasn't part of a grand plan; it was a natural result of following my curiosity and staying open to new ways of creating.

Of course! When you work with a particular medium for a long time, you naturally become really good at it. Because of that, switching to a new medium can feel intimidating and can make you question your direction. I've definitely felt that uncertainty.

But every time I spent some time exploring a new medium, I realised that each one brings its own kind of excitement and challenges. At the end of the day, that's exactly what they are: mediums. You are the designer. The medium simply becomes a different way for your creativity to take shape.

The more you experiment, the wider your creative toolkit becomes. You grow not only as a designer but also as a problem solver. You're no longer limited by a lack of familiarity with a particular medium because you've learned how to adapt your creative thinking across different formats.

I believe the early years of a designer's career should be about learning as much as possible. Explore different disciplines, understand how they work, and figure out what excites you. Over time, you may discover that you enjoy working across multiple mediums, or you may find one that allows you to create your best work. Either way, that clarity comes from experimentation and experience, not from choosing a single path too early.

Foundation, definitely. It has helped me throughout my career.

My time studying Multimedia and Animation taught me how organic elements behave, how emotions are conveyed and perceived, and how atmospheres are created and experienced. While that may sound broad, it ultimately comes down to understanding the essence of life and how people interact with the world around them.

The technical side of the industry is constantly evolving. Software, techniques, tools, and workflows continue to change, and you'll keep learning them throughout your career, whether you're five or ten years into the industry. What has remained consistently valuable is the foundation I built in college: how to approach a problem, how to think critically about design, and how to communicate emotion and meaning through creative work.

Those fundamentals have stayed relevant far longer than any specific software or technique I've learned along the way.

In some ways, they're very similar, and in other ways, they're vastly different.

The similarities lie in the core expectation: understanding a requirement or a problem and delivering the best possible solution. No matter where you work, you are expected to bring your skills, creativity, and perspective to the table, adding your own creative touch whenever the opportunity allows.

The biggest difference, in my experience, is ownership. In studios and startups, you often have complete or significant ownership of a project. You're involved from the first draft all the way to final delivery. That comes with greater decision-making responsibilities, greater risks, and, ultimately, a deeper sense of satisfaction when you see the work come to life.

In larger global companies, teams are much bigger, and your contribution is often one part of a much larger ecosystem. You don't always have control over every design decision, and collaboration becomes essential. While that can sometimes mean less individual ownership, it also exposes you to diverse perspectives, specialised expertise, and large-scale processes. It's a different way of working, but it's also one of the best environments for learning and growing as a designer.

At the end of the day, each environment teaches you something valuable, and experiencing them all has helped me become a more adaptable creative professional.

One of the biggest misconceptions is that the financial stability associated with UI/UX comes easily or quickly. In reality, stability often stems from years of discipline, problem-solving skills, and experience. It doesn't occur overnight just because you change fields.

Coming from a visual design or illustration background does give you an advantage in certain areas. You often have a stronger understanding of aesthetics, composition, balance, and visual storytelling. However, UI/UX is fundamentally about solving problems, and that's a very different challenge.

For me, visual design and illustration have always been about how I see the world and how I choose to interpret or express it. UI/UX, on the other hand, is almost the opposite. You're designing for a wide range of users with different needs, expectations, and behaviours. Your personal preferences or opinions about a design decision matter far less than whether that decision helps users achieve their goals.

So while learning the tools, processes, and workflows of UI/UX can happen relatively quickly, the bigger shift is learning to think differently about design itself. It's a transition from self-expression to user-centred problem solving. Once you embrace that mindset, your visual design background becomes a powerful asset rather than just a transferable skill.

It's right there in the question: storytelling!

A good design appears aesthetically pleasing, but a great design not only looks appealing; it also conveys a story. In UI design, it's rarely just about creating a new feature or adding functionality. It's about shaping the user's journey, understanding how they interact with a product, and creating experiences that feel intuitive, meaningful, and memorable.

Storytelling helps designers think beyond individual screens and focus on the larger experience. Every interaction, transition, and visual element contributes to how users feel as they move through a product. When done well, storytelling can make a journey feel smoother, more engaging, and ultimately more valuable to the user.

Coming from an illustration and motion background has helped me think visually and emotionally about experiences. It helps me gain a deeper understanding of the emotions a product aims to evoke in users and how these feelings can be expressed through design. Visual thinking serves as a bridge between functionality and experience, ensuring that a product not only performs well but also resonates with its users.

At its core, great UI design is about creating experiences that users can connect with, and storytelling is one of the most powerful tools we have to achieve that.

Yes, absolutely! I realised that being multi-skilled was a strength when I stopped feeling limited by the medium I was working in and focused entirely on the story I wanted to tell. I've certainly not mastered every skill, but having knowledge across different disciplines has saved me a tremendous amount of time. Instead of spending months learning a new medium before I can start solving a problem, I already have a foundation that allows me to explore different approaches right away.

Being multi-skilled also expands your creative arsenal. Rather than asking, "Can I do this?" you're able to focus on, "What's the best way to achieve this result?" That shift in mindset is incredibly empowering.

This has been especially valuable on projects where I started with one medium and later realised it wasn't doing justice to the idea or the story. Because I was comfortable working across different disciplines, I could pivot and explore another medium that better served the concept and helped it reach its full potential.

At the end of the day, every medium is simply a tool for communication. The more tools you have access to, the more freedom you have to choose the one that best expresses your idea.

I try not to think about tools in terms of categories or how different one is from another. At the end of the day, they're all exactly that: tools.

What I focus on instead are the principles of design and storytelling. No matter what medium you're working in, the goal is still to communicate an idea, solve a problem, or create an experience. The tools will change, but those fundamentals remain the same.

I keep coming back to storytelling because that's what ultimately matters. You'll work with different users, clients, companies, and products, all with unique requirements. If your focus is only on learning the latest tools, you'll either end up learning things you never use or using tools without fully understanding why you're using them.

I believe it's more important to learn how to break down a problem and think through a solution first. Once you understand what you're trying to achieve, you can then choose the right tool to help you get there. Approaching learning this way not only helps you discover new ways to use familiar tools, but often introduces you to entirely new ones as well.

More importantly, what you learn tends to stick because it's connected to solving a real problem. You're learning with purpose rather than learning out of fear of being left behind.

A lot of young creatives feel pressure to learn AI because everyone else seems to be using it, or to jump into every new discipline that appears. But chasing every trend can be overwhelming. Instead, focus on understanding the problem you're solving and the story you're trying to tell. Once you have that clarity, it becomes much easier to identify which tools are worth learning and which ones are simply noise.

This was a tough lesson for me to learn!

I have a strong preference for illustration, and early in my career, I often pushed my creativity in directions that weren't always necessary. Whenever there was an opportunity to add a visual flourish, I would usually seize it. Sometimes this approach was successful, but it also taught me that restraint can be just as important as creativity.

Over time, I realised that the most important thing isn't how creative a design looks, but whether it successfully solves the problem it was created to solve. A product is successful when users keep coming back because it makes their lives easier, not because it has the most beautiful illustration on the internet.

That's where my perspective shifted. Creativity isn't the destination in product design; it's a tool that helps you get there. If a creative element improves the experience, clarifies a concept, creates delight, or strengthens the product's story, then absolutely use it. But if it's creating friction, distraction, or cognitive overload, it's probably serving the designer more than the user.

I like to think of creativity as seasoning. A little can elevate the entire experience. Too much, and suddenly, nobody can taste the actual meal.

The balance comes from constantly asking one question: "Does this help the user?" If the answer is yes, it stays. If the answer is no, no matter how much I personally love it, it probably needs to go.

Internships are basically a soft launch into the real world.

They were my first professional experience, and they taught me many things that college simply couldn't. Things like communicating with teammates, understanding workplace culture, handling feedback, managing deadlines, and figuring out how to work with different kinds of people.

They also helped me get over a lot of my shyness. Talking to strangers, asking questions, presenting ideas, and putting your work out there can be scary at first. Internships kind of force you to get comfortable with it, and that's a skill that becomes incredibly valuable later on.

Another thing I realised was what the industry actually looks for. In college, you're learning so many different things at the same time that it's hard to tell which skills need the most attention. Internships helped me figure out where I was strong, where I needed to improve, and what skills were worth sharpening further.

Most importantly, they gave me my first real push toward illustration and visual design. Until then, I was exploring a bit of everything, but those experiences helped me realise that this was something I genuinely enjoyed and wanted to pursue further.

I would tell them that they're probably focusing on the wrong thing.

You're a designer because something about creating excites you. There was a reason you picked up that pencil, stylus, paintbrush, or opened that design software for the first time. Hold on to that feeling. Don't let the pressure to "catch up" make you forget why you started in the first place.

There will always be someone better at a particular skill, who knows a newer tool, or has more experience in a certain niche. That's never going away. A healthy amount of competition can be great because it keeps you curious and encourages you to keep learning. But constantly comparing yourself to others is exhausting and rarely productive.

From my own experience, I never built my career by chasing mastery in a single thing. I built it by staying curious, experimenting, and following what genuinely interested me. Some of those interests stayed, some changed, and together they shaped the kind of designer I became.

So don't pressure yourself to master everything, or even to master one thing as quickly as possible. Focus on learning, exploring, and getting a little better than you were yesterday. Skills grow with time. Experience grows with time. Confidence grows with time.

The important thing is to keep creating and keep that excitement alive. The rest tends to follow.

1. Stay Curious. And I don't just mean about new tools, mediums, or design trends. Be curious about other designers, too. Learn about their processes, how they think, how they approach problems, and the journeys that brought them where they are today. You learn a lot from your own experiences, but you can learn just as much from someone else's.

2. Be willing to have your thinking challenged. One thing I've learned is that the way you approach problems will keep evolving throughout your career. Different roles, industries, and projects require different ways of thinking. The more open you are to questioning your assumptions and updating your perspective, the more adaptable you'll become as a designer.

3. Don't forget to have fun. Yes, career growth is important. Building skills, finding opportunities, and growing professionally are all part of the journey. But don't get so focused on the destination that you forget why you started. The best part of being a designer is creating things. That excitement, that curiosity, that joy of making something from nothing is worth holding on to. In my experience, the people who stay passionate about the craft tend to build the most sustainable careers in the long run.

If I had to summarise it, I'd say: stay curious, stay adaptable, and stay excited about creating.

Good design takes time, and good designers require time to grow. It’s natural to feel like you’re falling behind, but remember that growth isn’t a race. You’ve followed your passion, taken a chance on a creative career, and become a designer, which is a remarkable achievement in itself. Some days, you will produce outstanding work, and on other days, simply continuing to create will be enough. And honestly, some days, that’s perfectly fine.