I trained as a graphic designer. The first software I learned to use properly was Illustrator — vectors, paths, the satisfying click of an anchor point snapping into place. Print was the goal: layouts, identities, things you could hold. Then came Dreamweaver, and something shifted. Suddenly I could take a design I'd built in Illustrator and push it into a browser — static, hand-coded, mine. That translation, from a file on a screen to something a person could actually visit, was the moment I fell in love with the web. The first thing I made for money was still a page layout — print, not screen — for a client whose name I've forgotten in a city I've since left. But the seed was already in.
That was Recife, Brazil, around 2010. I didn't yet know I'd end up in Dublin, building responsive websites for a CMS called Storyblok, watching a layout reflow at 768 pixels and feeling something I'd later recognise as satisfaction. None of that was on the map. The map only had design on it, and design meant print, and print meant grids and typography and the quiet pleasure of a well-set page.
The web came later, the way it came for a lot of people my age: not as an arrival but as a slow rearrangement. One day I was working on visual identity systems and the next I was learning HTML so I could push the work I'd designed into something a person could actually use. CSS followed because CSS was unavoidable. JavaScript followed because the job kept asking me to. By the time I noticed what was happening, I'd stopped being a designer who knew some code and started being something less defined — a person who could take an idea from a wireframe to a live site without handing it off.
I spent the years in between in roles that didn't quite have names. At Stefanini in Recife I was officially a Web Designer, but I spent most of my time in front-end maintenance and visual components, learning how production systems worked and why they sometimes didn't. At a smaller agency called Nina I built responsive web applications from scratch — Angular and Node and a lot of CSS — and discovered that I liked the build side more than I'd expected. There's a particular satisfaction in writing the thing rather than describing it. The translation step disappears. What you make is what runs.
In Dublin I worked at DS3 Media for a few years — first as a Web Designer Specialist, then as a freelancer — and the role kept tilting further toward the code. UX research and wireframes were still part of it, but the bulk of my time was implementation. By the time I joined Together Digital in 2021, the tilt was a full lean. I started there as a junior and grew into the developer I am now — working in React, Next.js, and Tailwind, and increasingly making the engineering calls behind the work: performance, components, the patterns the team would reuse, and an increasing care for accessibility. My title still says developer. The work has quietly become something more.
It's not the work I trained for. It's also not work I drifted into by accident. Somewhere in those years I realised I prefer the part where the design becomes real — where the typography I'd been studying for a decade lands in the browser at the right size on the right device, and behaves on a 360px screen the way it does on a 1920px one. The design background hasn't gone anywhere. It still shapes how I work. I notice when a button is the wrong height. I care, perhaps too much, about the line that separates a website that works from one that feels considered.
I still think of myself as a designer, in the way that someone who studied music still thinks of themselves as a musician even when they've stopped performing. The training doesn't go away. It just becomes the lens. These days I look at the work through a developer's eyes and a designer's instincts, and most of the time it feels like a good place to be standing.
The long way around, in the end, brought me somewhere unexpected and quite specific: Dublin, in 2026, building websites that work on every screen and trying to make them feel like something more than functional. I didn't plan it. I'm not sure I would have. But I'm here, and the work is good, and there's a kind of peace in that.