I’ve been designing since I was a kid. I started when I was about 9, drawing CD covers in my notebook in the style of No Limit and Cash Money Records. Loud, garish, gaudy; what’s not to love?

How I got started

I arrived in Prague in 2016 intending to complete a TEFL certificate and wound up with more than I bargained for. I wanted to teach English because it offered an opportunity to travel, see the world, explore new cultures, and live a life I had only dreamed of. For a kid who grew up on social assistance (read: welfare), that’s some kind of fantasy.

I made it to South Korea in 2017 and ended up doing more educational design than teaching. My first project was designing a coding course for ESL learners aged 6-15. I had three days notice and knew absolutely nothing about coding, but managed to pull it off using a few simple tactics that have been the bedrock of my design philosophy ever since; working backwards, chunking, and K.I.S.S.; keep it simple, silly idiot. I was planning to move back to Prague once my contract finished, but…

As plans will be, plans will go awry.

Change of Plans

I left Korea after I developed a parasitic infection which almost killed me and thought, “y’know what? Life is short, and I need to do something else”.

From there I returned to Canada to spend the next six years developing programs, designing curriculums, and delivering workshops for a myriad of clients, ranging from Universities in Canada to private corporations in East Asia. I have had dealings in Korea, China, Thailand, Japan, and started to dabble in Indonesia and Vietnam before it came time to move back to Prague and onto the next chapter of my life.

Onward and Upward

Now here I am, looking for another adventure.

It is the cliche of the day to say “I am all about human-centred design” (and also sounds like a chatbot wrote it). Design is not about metrics, trends, or the garishness I used to love in those old CD covers. Design is about speaking to the human condition by drawing on our collective experience. We are living in a digital world. I want to infect the machine by injecting some soul into my work.

One of my professors at university said, “Bad art does not recognise that there is death in the world”.

As my own addendum, I would say, “bad design forgets that the human condition can’t be generated by AI”.