Before design
Before I was a designer I was a ship engineer.
Marine force engineer in the engine room. I shipped on cargo vessels back and forth across the planet, waking up every day to maintain engines and the dozens of mechanical systems that keep a ship from sinking. Hard hands, real grease, the kind of work where if you do it badly people drown.
It's the most unglamorous setup for "how I became a designer" that I can think of, which is why it's the right place to start. Most designers were always going to be designers. I wasn't. I got here by a different road, and the road shaped how I work.
The ten months
COVID hit while I was at sea. The voyage that should have been three months ran ten.
People assume I left the sea because the work was hard. The work was hard, but the work was always hard. That's not why I left.
I left because I couldn't see anyone I loved for ten months. There's a particular kind of math you do at sea, where you count what you're earning against what you're missing. Somewhere in that ten months the math stopped working.
I had a girlfriend back home, working as a UI/UX designer. Every time I came home between voyages I'd watch what she did. Hands moving in Figma. Meetings, clients, deliverables. And honestly? I didn't believe her job was real. I couldn't understand how anyone was paying actual money for what looked, from the outside, like rearranging rectangles on a screen.
Ten months of staring at the ocean is a long time to revisit a wrong assumption.
ChatGPT arrives
ChatGPT launched. My girlfriend showed it to me, the same way she'd been showing me other software. This time it was different.
I could ask. Out loud, in my own words, whatever was on my mind. "Why does this work this way?" "What does this function do?" "Show me an example of X." I didn't have to read chapters in order. I could start anywhere. The system would meet me at my level and pull me up to the next one, and the next, until I'd accidentally learned something that would have taken me six months of structured study.
This is the part most people don't talk about with AI. It's not just a productivity tool. For some of us — the ones whose brains were never going to make it through a textbook — it's the first tool that lets us learn the way we actually learn. It removed a barrier I'd accepted as permanent.
Why design, not development
I tried Figma not long after.
I make music and used FL Studio for years — a serious DAW with a punishing interface that takes most people months to find their way around. After FL Studio, Photoshop felt brutal. Figma felt obvious. Everything was where I expected it to be. Every tool did what it said it would. After fighting FL Studio for years, Figma was a gift.
That clicked something. If software like Figma was this well-designed, someone had been designing it. Someone had cared about where every button lived and what every cursor state communicated. Suddenly I understood what designers did, because I was using their work and feeling the difference.
And then I thought about being a developer again, more seriously this time. And I realized something: developers don't decide much. Not the important things. They build what someone else designed, what someone else specified, what the BSA wrote up and the product owner approved. The developer's job is to iterate and execute. Real, valuable, hard work — but not where the decisions live.
I wanted to be where the decisions live. So I picked design.
Eight months later I had my first design job.
How I work now
I'll be honest: I don't really know how to work without AI.
That sounds like an exaggeration. It isn't. From the day I started learning design, AI was in my workflow. Every project. Every research phase. Every IA exercise. Every moment of being stuck on something and not knowing where to look — I'd just ask. The assistant has been next to me since day one.
Of course I could work without it. I know how to do the things. I know the artifacts, I know the methods, I know the patterns. But why would I want to? The book-method of design — go to Medium, find an article, read someone else's account of how to make a user journey map, apply it to your project — that's slow and lossy. The chat-method is faster and more direct. I describe what I'm trying to do. I get back the relevant patterns, the right questions to ask, the artifacts that would actually serve this project versus the ones that wouldn't. Then I do the work.
AI doesn't do my thinking. It does my remembering. It holds the corpus of what good design looks like, and I bring the judgment about which parts of that corpus apply here, now, for this team. The thinking is still mine. The decisions are still mine. The accountability is mine. AI is the assistant who's already read every book so I don't have to.
That's why I ended up in my company's AI initiative — the top 10 designers using AI most aggressively. And that's why, a few months after that, I got promoted to AI product owner.
The interesting part
The interesting part is that life keeps going.
I'll figure things out as they come. If AI eventually gets good enough to replace what I do — fine. I changed careers once already, from sailor to designer, in less than a year, in a domain I didn't believe was real until I was inside it. If I have to change again, I'll change again.
The deeper thing — and this is what I'd want a hiring manager to actually read — is that I don't think of myself as a designer first. I think of myself as someone with a creative head who happens to be doing design right now.
I made music for years. I shot music videos. I built things. The actual through-line in my life isn't "design" — it's that I see things differently and I can't stop trying to make things. Design is problems with twenty plausible answers, where my job is to find which one matters.
That's the part AI can't replace, because that's not really a skill — it's a way of being. The creative head was there before design, it's there during design, it'll be there after design, whatever "after design" turns out to mean. Tools change. The way I look at problems doesn't.
The thesis
The process is the product.
Not a slogan. The actual claim. What I do isn't the Figma files — they're outputs. The work is the way I think through problems. The way I use AI to compress research and ideation. The way creative pattern-matching from music, video, engines and design all stack on top of each other when I sit down with a problem.
Process — real skill, not the artifacts or tools. They all will be different next year. The process compounds.
I became designer by asking question. The questions are what got me here, and the questions are what'll take me wherever I'm going next.
I'm not the guy who reads books.
I'm the guy who asks the questions.