How I became a designer

My best friend and I ended up studying at different universities. She went into journalism and quickly started achieving success there. One day, we were walking and stopped by a display of fashion magazines. She showed me that one of the well-known magazines had published her article—it was right there on the cover. That was a turning point in my life. I wouldn’t call it jealousy; it was more a feeling that I didn’t yet know my own path.

From that very day, I kept thinking about who I wanted to become. I was studying marketing, so naturally I considered it as a path, although, to be honest, I didn’t really understand what marketing was at the time. I would also look at the huge billboards along the roads and think—what if I became the designer behind them? But for some reason, it felt unreachable back then, even though I had an art school background.

Trigger 1

As often happens in life, once the main trigger faded, I calmed down and returned to everyday concerns—like my weight and my relationships with others. But I was still occasionally drawn back to developing my skills in design. One autumn, I downloaded some Photoshop courses somewhere, infecting my computer with viruses more than once.

I remember my first lesson—it was a smiley face. The tutorial had pages and pages of intimidating documentation, and with a bit of dread, I finally sat down to draw it. Below, you can see a smiley my daughter drew—she’s 6!

Trigger 2

As I approached the end of my bachelor’s degree, I became increasingly concerned that I still didn’t know who I would become. It felt unusual and strange—out of nowhere, this question started to deeply trouble me. To ease that anxiety, I returned to Photoshop again and again, and this way I gained basic knowledge.

Trigger 3

The decisive moment came when I was finishing my fifth year—I started looking for jobs, and it was a stressful process. Without experience, no one wanted to hire me, so I spent several months searching for my place. Around 2011, web development was rapidly growing in my country, and it just so happened that it was because of my Photoshop skills that I was hired as a web designer.

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