Years ago, I came across a tweet by Jenny Johannesson: “Don't forget why you became a designer”. It made me think about why I am where I am today, what I did to get here, and what my goals are as a designer.

I was always passionate about art and visual design. I liked the way art and design could be found everywhere — in museums and architecture, sure, but also in people’s homes, on book covers, in everyday life. So it seemed almost obvious to me to go to art school, like there wasn’t really any other path that made sense for me. As an 18-year old, what I wanted was mostly to express myself — I didn’t want to critique other people’s work, I didn’t want for my own work to be critiqued, I didn’t actually want to have anything to do with people at all: Just me, my headphones, the music I loved most, and all the images inside my head that felt the need to come out.

## Keep the internet weird

Like a ton of millennials who now find themselves working in tech, I grew up when the internet was still something new and weird; it was a place to be explored, where anything was possible, rather than just something mundane to look up getting from A to B or opening hours. Maybe I’m not giving it the credit it’s due, because these days we can do so much more than that with our devices; yet sometimes it feels like the original magic has faded, leaving us with sites that all look the same, experiences that all feel the same, and a desperate need to be connected 24/7 while not really being connected at all.

As a teenager, I loved spending hours (sometimes whole weekends) on making changes to my myspace page, playing around with my Neopets, adding “work” on deviantart. I loved writing in my livejournal and reading other people’s weblogs and, further down the road, building HTML layouts from images I’d put together in a Paint Shop Pro “design”. I loved building things even though I wasn’t aware of it yet; I loved learning by doing (something I still do today) and most of all, I loved having found a little piece of internet that felt all mine, with people I could relate to.

## Teenage Angst

Art school felt so much different than the playground I’d experienced growing up online. I was a young adult eager to paint and photograph and collage all of my feelings, but suddenly studying art felt like hitting a wall. For all of my work, I was expected to have a process: What was my hypothesis? What did I want to explore? What things had I tried, what had worked, what didn’t? What was my plan, what were the steps that took me to developing the final artwork? For most of the work I did, my starting point was a song, or a lyric, or something that made me feel something, and the final work was me trying to put it into something other than words. The problem was that it seemed like everyone else worked differently.

In hindsight, I realise that this in part had something to do with age: I was the youngest in my department by a good five years (if not ten), and I remained the youngest for most of my art career. There were so many things I had yet to learn, and I struggled with planning my artwork —this planning seemed like a ridiculous idea to me, because art was something to be felt and expressed, something that came out of you rather than a thing that needed to be planned over weeks, and months, until it was finally realised. I was scrappy, used whatever materials were available, didn’t think about “the observer”. I didn’t stick to one medium, and constantly hopped between collages, photography, drawing, video, audio, and performance work. At some point, I learned to work backwards: first came the artwork, and then whatever concept made sense.

## Nevertheless, she persisted

Like pretty much every art or design student ever, I hated critiques. There was a dreaded “jour fixe” once a week where we discussed class topics and could show work in progress. Towards the end of the semester, the atmosphere would feel more tense as we showed our final piece.

I could never decouple myself from my work, but in spite of that I knew I still wanted to work in visual design, somehow. At some point, I aligned my goals with what I wanted to learn (typography, printing, graphic design, programming, ceramics) instead of whatever I was expected to learn in my degree (new media history, copyright law, cinema 4d, after effects, and last but not least socialising with gallerists and other artists). This helped me get through the months and years of uninteresting classes; I got all of the credits I needed to graduate (just barely), did all of the work, got some of the best grades. I got pretty much all I could get out of art school, and then I dropped out.

Afterwards, I floated.

I had discovered programming along the way and somehow found myself working as a Rails developer. The further I went into my career — building tech communities, organising workshops, teaching women to code — the more I forgot about the spark that ignited everything.

## Multipotentialite

When I started writing this post, it was mid-2022; I put it aside for a long time, and now — coming back to it with fresh eyes, I realise not much has changed. Back then I had what I thought was my dream job (and I still do). I’m a designer!

Just like it did when I was 14, time disappears when I sit in front of my screen to create something — except now I have my own computer, work in Figma, and headphones that aren’t downright terrible. The other difference is that I’ve (sort of) learned to play by the rules, while still allowing myself the odd quirky project. I like to think that it’s ok to let everything I’ve been before influence my work, in ways that are maybe unexpected for an industry that now lives to ship fast and break things.

In his book “Seventy-nine short essays on design”, Michael Bierut explains, through a series of anecdotes, that a designer needs to be interested in design… and in everything else. This may sound like it’s specific to working for clients as a graphic designer, but it’s not. When I first read that, something clicked: I was given permission to dive deep into topics I found interesting, to deeply love programming, and ceramics, and dog training, and CSS, and painting my walls, and DIY, and martial arts, and reading sci-fi books, and none of that invalidated the fact that I was and remained a designer.

Design, just like coding, is a skill you can learn and something you can get really into if you are given the time and space to explore; and yet, sometimes it feels like we never give people, especially newcomers and juniors, enough time for that creative exploration that will make any ok designer become a good designer, and any good designer become a great designer. I became a designer because I love building things. I love the feeling of seeing a website or something else I’ve created out in the world, and I love it even more when it’s something a little different.

## Digital Gardens

The internet feels so different now from how it did when I first encountered it. It feels gatekeeper-ey, it feels exhausting and at times just filled with garbage.

There are a couple of places that have flourished that feel magical, still.

As I write this, it’s the end of February 2025 and in a few hours, [posts.cv](http://posts.cv) will wind down. That, indeed, felt like a magical place — and what made it magical (apart from the people and the wonderful community) was the ease with which you could put something out there into the world, similarly to publishing a page on geocities, without hurdles, without needing to code, without really needing to think about what happens in the background.

Of course there is a catch — the moment the platform disappears, the mark you’ve left out into the world disappears with it.

I’m writing the last few words before my profile gets swallowed by the void, an attempt at my very own time capsule, maybe.

So many people lately have been describing owning your content as taking care of your digital garden. I’ve used that metaphor, too. The digital garden — the tending, the weeding, the growing — is why I’ve become a designer, actually.

I haven’t forgotten that yet, and I hope I never will.

Don't forget why you became a designer

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