ABOUT ME

I grew up in Johannesburg, South Africa, through the final years of Apartheid, the first democratic election, and the complicated, hopeful, difficult years that followed. I was always drawing, building things, taking things apart to see how they worked.

I trained as a graphic designer and moved to Portugal in my early twenties with a diploma, and no network. Creative agencies turned me away because I didn’t have a university qualification. So I started at the bottom, did good work, and kept moving.

Over the next decade I built a career in digital design. First in print, then web, then UX. I spent 14 years in a traditional corporate environment, never once getting promoted despite being the person everyone came to when something actually needed to get done. I sent hundreds of job applications over three years before I finally found a way out.

I mention this not for sympathy but because it shapes how I see organisations. I know what it feels like to do your best work inside a system that can’t see it. I know what it costs people when operating models are built around process compliance rather than human potential. That’s not abstract to me, it’s an experience I lived.

When I discovered UX in 2012, something clicked. Not just the craft of it, but the underlying logic: that you have to understand how people actually work before you can design something they’ll use. I’ve applied that logic ever since. First to products, then to the organisations building them.