My life as a designer

I got my first computer when I was 11, and I spent most of my time on it changing the colors of the operating system. All of it. Every window, every menu, every bit of UI I could get my hands on. No internet connection, nothing to copy, no idea this was a thing people did. I just knew the defaults felt wrong and I could make them better. That was the whole hobby. I was redesigning UI before I knew the word for it.

Then social media showed up, and I found MySpace.

I spent my high school years building MySpace templates. Tons of them. I taught myself Photoshop and Illustrator, learned how to make gifs and videos, picked up Dreamweaver, and built my own website where people could buy the templates I made. It turned into a genuinely lucrative little business for a 14-year-old. I just loved making things. I’d make a graphic, figure out how to animate it, figure out how to sell it, and do it again.

Here’s the part that’s almost funny looking back: I never realized you could be a designer for a real job. In my head, this was a hobby. Something I did because I couldn’t not do it. The idea that someone would pay me to do this as an actual career never crossed my mind.

So I went to college for Interactive Graphic Design and worked full time alongside it. And I was bored, in the way that tells you something. Everything they were teaching, I already knew. I’d been doing it for years. One of my teachers ran her own design business and offered to bring me on, which was the first time it really clicked that this could be the thing.

One night I just decided. I wanted to learn and grow so badly, and I knew I wasn’t going to find it in a classroom. So I went looking for a real job. I applied, and the next day I got a callback from a consulting company doing work for Fisher-Price and Mattel.

I wish you could have seen my portfolio then. It was terrible. Genuinely bad. But something in it was enough, and I got the job.

And then I took a leap of faith and dropped out of college to take it.

That was the start. Ever since, I’ve been a self-taught designer, and I’ve never stopped being one. Fourteen-plus years into the career now, and somewhere around twenty-five years of actually designing, if you count the kid recoloring her OS at 11. Which I do.

I love this. It’s not the thing I do for work. It’s the thing I think about, the way I see, the reason the defaults still feel wrong to me. Design is my passion and it’s genuinely who I am. It’s everything I think and breathe.

Still recoloring everything. Just with better tools now.