I’ve always been the eccen­tric kid. Most adults thought I was dis­turb­ing. While most kids were draw­ing pic­tures of cats and dogs I drew a cock­roach with really long stilts-like legs. While most chil­dren were draw­ing pic­tures of mom and dad, I drew the naked women I saw in my par­ents’ porn and make sure I scrib­bled in some pubic hair. I liked draw­ing a lot. I even won a Founder’s Day award in high school for my nar­cis­sis­tic self-portrait sketch. I believe my eccen­tric­ity and love for draw­ing set me up for an uncon­ven­tional path to designerhood.

My child­hood super cock­roach (recollection)

At the time when I was sup­posed to be study­ing for the O Lev­els, I was actu­ally more con­cerned with open­ing a bicy­cle shop. Nat­u­rally I didn’t do well for most of the pre-O Lev­els exams and the school decided to kick me out. I then some­how ended up in a tech­ni­cal school and had my first encounter with the com­puter. I learned HTML and Flash. I was sud­denly armed with tools which allowed me to cre­ate like never before. I left tech­ni­cal school because it sucked and tried to enroll in a mul­ti­me­dia course. Since I’ve already spent a month learn­ing Flash 5 and HTML, instead of going to school I boldly applied for an intern­ship at a small design stu­dio and began my jour­ney to become a designer. Of course I got kicked out from there too. This time because I wiped the files by acci­dent from one of the com­pany computers.

Since then I have been neck-deep in graphic design. I free­lanced on and off, worked for stu­dios, did print and web and relent­lessly improved myself with all the free lit­er­a­ture I could find. I became good at typog­ra­phy, I knew how off­set print­ers work, I could code in HTML and Action­Script. And then the web stan­dards move­ment started. By this time I was already pro­fi­cient in the design ver­ti­cal. I saw web stan­dards as a nice chal­lenge. At the time you could get a lot of kudos when you could code com­plex web pages in table-less XHTML. I liked that and so I coded in XHTML Strict and picked up CSS.

Way before Steve Jobs denounced Flash, I made an effort to do more standards-based web­sites and even­tu­ally ditched Flash for good. I became good at it and became a sought-after designer in my local startup com­mu­nity. Work­ing in star­tups exposed me to rich web appli­ca­tions and web frame­works. I started call­ing myself a UI Designer and picked up things like infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture and usabil­ity engi­neer­ing. I poured myself into all the good books on the sub­jects. I spent as much as $200 a month at Kinoku­niya Books. Not sat­is­fied with merely being a fol­lower I started writ­ing a blog on design philosophy.

Work­ing with devel­op­ers on sev­eral projects that ran on frame­works I learned the intri­ca­cies of MVC and became famil­iar with CakePHP and Ruby on Rails. I also had to learn sub­ver­sion so I can work on the view layer directly and not rely on a devel­oper to inte­grate my code. Although I did not yet have the courage to go near the model and con­troller lay­ers I knew them. I also went deeper into Javascript and picked up jQuery because that was part of the UI. I also soon ditched Sub­ver­sion and picked up Git.

After work­ing with so many star­tups it was inevitable I wanted to start one of my own. I had no lack of prod­uct ideas. Most of them are crap but last year I had the idea for Lik­ables. It’s a Pinterest-like web­site but I didn’t know about Pin­ter­est until I launch Lik­ables and some­one told me about it. I orig­i­nally planned to have a devel­oper friend help engi­neer the back-end in Ruby on Rails while I focused on the front-end. But because she had a full-time job and couldn’t com­mit as much time as I wanted her to I ended up learn­ing Ruby on Rails and did at least half of the back-end work. I stud­ied Ruby and Rails with as much inten­sity as I stud­ied design. I bought Ruby books and Rails books. I used Rails for Zom­bies, Lynda.com and Railscasts. I would take off and try to imple­ment some­thing and course-correct in the mid­dle with new things I learn. I learned to refac­tor rub­bish code. I made sure I under­stood things deeply like Active Record, migra­tions and how con­trollers tied the view and model together so I wasn’t just blindly copy­ing and past­ing code. I used Stack­Over­flow like a team of free pro­gram­mers eager to pro­vide me with the code I needed.

After Lik­ables, I had the idea for Mocku.ps and decided I would build it myself. Now that I have launched the pro­to­type with back-end and front-end code I’d writ­ten myself, with an inter­face and inter­ac­tions I designed, with a brand icon I illus­trated, I think I am finally some­what a T-shape designer.