As written in the hero section of this website, I resigned because I realized I had stopped growing. Don't get me wrong, I don't hate that company at all. The work just gradually drifted away from what I was trained for, and I didn't push back hard enough until it was too late.
Short recap: I joined my previous company in 2018 as an illustrator and animator because back then they were developing an educational game, a city building game with a bunch of minigames that teach kids English.
How It Started
It was fun until the game got shut down. After that, the work shifted toward presentation slides and social media graphics. Simpler stuff. Nothing wrong with that, but not where my skills lived.
Then came a new educational app, not a game, a web app, so I got to work on the mascot and some UI design. After that I didn't have any work related to my skill set.
The Moment I Knew
Until one day I tried to practice my skills by designing UI, websites, and game assets, and that's when I realized my skills were not as sharp as they used to be. I'd been getting dumber for years.
That's when I knew it was time to move on. The gap between my title and my actual work had grown too wide, and the only person who could fix that was me. So I resigned.
"I stopped growing for years." That sentence is both the saddest and most motivating thing I've ever realized about myself.
Why I'm Telling You This
And that's the reason I left, to sharpen my skills back, see the outside world, try to catch up with other designers, new design trends, and new cutting-edge tech (AI). I'm just at the beginning. I think 9 months is still early for me to catch up with what I left behind.
This website is the documentation of that catch-up. Everything on here, the apps, the stories, the wins and the embarrassing losses, it's all part of the same process. A principal designer who spent years on brochures, crawling back to relevance one project at a time.
Zoom in, it looks rough. Zoom out, it's a comeback story. I'm choosing to film wide.