The story
A multitude in one
I started making websites in Brazil in the late ’90s. Over dial-up, before Google existed. And yeah, I know how old that sounds.
The web let me mix everything I was interested in at once: design, code, music, words, images, ideas. It started as free creative expression and accidentally became work, without ever quite stopping being something I love.
Resumes flatten all of that into bullet points: Brazil, California, Amsterdam, Canada, Sydney. Agencies, startups, Booking.com, Shopify, Atlassian, Figma. Written down now, it looks much straighter than it ever felt while I was living it. A lot of the time, I didn’t know what the next step was going to be.
What changed from place to place was the language around the work. The things I cared about were already there.
At Booking.com, “putting the customer at the centre of everything we do” meant testing the thing and being willing to let the answer change your mind. At Atlassian, the same instinct had a less polite expression: Don’t #@!% the customer.
I liked both because they put words around something I already believed: start with the person on the other side of the work.
I’ve always worn a lot of hats — and I’m not talking about my absurdly large baseball cap collection.
I liked copywriting and art direction, design and code. And I’ve never been much good at caring about only one layer of a product. I want to know whether we’re solving the right problem, whether the system underneath makes sense, how the team is making the decision, and then whether the interaction, the type, the spacing and the pixels hold up.
The details matter because that’s where all the earlier decisions become real.
“Good design is hard.”
Good design is hard.Being a Designer Advocate at Figma feels like a collision of a lot of those things. I get to stay close to the people using the product, bring what I hear back into the company, help people understand what we’re building, experiment with new ways of working, speak, teach, and still make things.
The writing, the talks, the mentoring and Latinxs Who Design all come from the same place. When something interests me, I pull it apart, talk about it, and make something out of what I learned.
I’m in Sydney now, with my wife, three kids, a dog and a cat. Nearly thirty years into working in this field and still learning.
That’s part of why this site exists: to share some of the bullet points, expand on them, and keep some of the mess around them too.
