As written in the hero section of this website, I resigned from a company where I stopped growing. Don't get me wrong, I don't hate that company, I just feel like they didn't know what to do with my set of skills, or they didn't have any tasks for me.
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
I was designing assets for that game, designing UI, and doing animation. It was fun until they decided to shut that game down. Then for a couple of years my work was only doing presentation slides which "don't have to be pretty," they said. The same message also applied to social media design.
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 they didn't need an "overqualified" designer in their company, but they also didn't want to fire me, so I resigned.
"I've been getting dumber 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.