I wanted to be a comic book artist because I loved comics. Always had, comics, manga, anime, drawing. My favorite artists as a kid were Sal Buscema and John Byrne.
The love took shape through friends. Rene, in the early 90s, would invent his own Rambo stories and draw them out, genuinely good, with a sense of anatomy no six or seven year old should have. Then Carlos, who I met around nine. His bones were fragile, so he couldn’t play sports, and a couple of us were always a bit protective of him. His parents were professional artists, and he was the one who taught me that drawing anatomy was something you could actually learn: how muscle attaches to form, how to think in three dimensions. The three of us started buying comic books every month.
Around 2001 I had a computer and an A4 scanner at home. Gaming magazines came bundled with demo CDs back then, and one of them had a demo of Photoshop. I’d learned that the artists at Marvel, DC, and Image colored their work in it, so I wanted in. I fired it up the first time with no idea what anything did, opened a scan of one of my drawings, and felt a little awestruck seeing my own work on screen. Then I tried to color it. I didn’t know layers existed, so I took the brush, zoomed all the way in, and colored almost pixel by pixel, careful not to touch the lines I’d drawn. A friend in high school later showed me layer modes, and a book I still own, the complete guide to Photoshop’s layers, solidified the rest. By fourteen or fifteen I could do nearly anything in it, all self-taught.
Back then anyone could spin up a web forum. I lived on art forums, conceptart.org, eatpoo, DeviantArt, places full of artists, some of whom draw for Marvel now. Through DeviantArt I met two girls from my own country, both artists, and we wanted our own corner of the web, somewhere to post our work away from the bigger sites. So I set up a forum for us, and its customized area ran on HTML and CSS. That was my way in. I worked out the tags one by one, and when I realized a code like #12345 would change a color on the page, I kept going, bending the forum until it looked like ours.
A friend who’s a software engineer now was getting into programming back then, good with ActionScript but with no eye for design. So we teamed up: I designed a page, he coded it in Flash, and he sold it. Our first paying gig, and it felt incredible. That was when, on top of the Photoshop years, I started developing a real sense of what worked visually, hierarchy, typography, the gap between web and editorial design. I was fascinated by the editorial layouts in Bauhaus books, and web pages back then had none of that, so I started blending the two. By the time I reached university I had real tools in hand, enough to look at a design and ask not just what felt off, but what decisions led the designer there.
After high school I wanted something with art in it. My classmates went into architecture, but it never felt artistic to me, so I picked design, mostly because the course had classes called Drawing 1 and Drawing 2. This has drawing, I thought, it has to be good. I had no idea the tinkering I’d done as a teenager was a profession with a name. University was my first real contact with design as a field, industrial, editorial, digital, and the digital classes were where I knew I belonged. Because I already lived in Photoshop, I spent that time going deeper into Illustrator, HTML, and CSS while everyone else caught up. One day a teacher caught me out of my seat, helping a classmate. She asked why I wasn’t doing the assignment. I’d already finished mine, I told her. She gave me an approving look and left it there.
Besides the love of art and the curiosity, the thing that never changed is the excitement of building. I still draw, and what thrills me is turning a few boxes in perspective into a full figure. I start with only a vague idea of how it will look, then I put the parts together, experiment, and something emerges. Design is the same feeling. Past the research and the problem space and the hypotheses, the exciting part is assembling the thoughts, the assumptions, the feedback, the patterns, and watching them become a solution. That is why the line between art and tech never meant much to me. They were always the same act: starting with a rough idea and building something real out of the pieces. The comic-book kid and the product designer were never really two different people.