I didn't come to design through art school. I came through the service floor.

Before I ever opened Figma, I spent years in customer-facing operations and IT support — the person on the other side of the counter when a system failed someone. I watched people re-enter the same information three times, abandon a form because one error message made no sense, and lose trust in a company over a thirty-second interaction. Nobody designs those moments on purpose. They happen when the people building the product have never stood where the customer stands.

I have. That's my unfair advantage.

I retrained formally — a User Experience Design graduate certificate at Humber Polytechnic in Toronto, plus the Google UX Design Certificate — and I've since built end-to-end product work spanning research, information architecture, interaction design, and UI systems. My case studies on Behance have been viewed more than twelve thousand times and appreciated by hundreds of designers, but the number I care about most is simpler: how many steps did I remove between a person and the thing they came to do?

Why financial products. Money is where design stakes are highest. A confusing checkout loses a sale; a confusing transfer screen loses trust — and trust is the entire product a bank sells. My work on redesigning a bank's mobile experience taught me that fintech design is mostly the discipline of making people feel certain: certain the money went where they sent it, certain of what a fee means, certain nothing is hidden. I want to do that work inside a Canadian institution that takes it seriously.

How I work. I write problems down before I design solutions. I show my reasoning, not just my screens. I'd rather present three honest options with trade-offs than one polished mockup with no rationale. And I treat developers, PMs, and support teams as design partners — because the support queue is the most honest usability report a company owns.

Off the clock. I'm a worldbuilder at heart — I've been writing an epic fantasy universe for years — and a football fan who will happily defend his position in the Messi debate. Both taught me the same lesson: great systems are internally consistent, and details are where belief lives.

[EDIT: Review every claim above — adjust years, add employer names where you're comfortable, and cut anything that doesn't sound like you. This is a draft written to be corrected.]