Not the most obvious entry point into a design career. (*it also wasn’t with Hallmark but rather a smaller competitor), but there’s something useful about learning to design when the brief is “make someone feel something in the two seconds before they open it.” That’s where I started and it taught me early on that design isn’t really about how something looks. It’s about how it makes a person feel.

From there, I moved into a boutique advertising agency as a graphic designer, and eventually took the leap into running my own design agency — print, web, digital, out-of-home, packaging, the full spread. Running a business teaches you things a job never quite can, mostly about how design decisions actually survive contact with budgets, deadlines, and people who know very little about design. When I closed that chapter, I went back into corporate life as Creative Director of an in-house digital agency for a large telecom’s subsidiary, and it was around here that I formally studied User Experience Design, because I’d started to notice the interesting problems weren’t visual anymore. They were behavioural.

A promotion to Digital Manager came with a decision to properly study Project Management too, not because I wanted to stop designing, but because I’d started to realise that good design ideas die more often from poor delivery than from poor thinking. That’s stuck with me ever since.