I grew up in Petroșani, a mining town in Transylvania, and studied computer science at the University of Petroșani before design was ever the plan. I have always had a taste for typography, architecture and video games, and for a long time I had no idea those things would end up being the job.
I have been freelancing under my own name since 2008, and I have spent stretches in house too, at agencies in Colorado Springs, Wisconsin and Idaho, and remote for a platform team in Munich. Front end development and technical SEO, usually on the same project. I love JavaScript. I like that you can have an idea in the morning and be clicking on it in the afternoon, and that there is always a better way to do the thing you did last week.
It started with old German design books. Bauhaus furniture, honest materials, nothing wasted. That way of thinking never left me, and it is still how I decide what to take out of a layout.
I am also passionate about typography, which in my opinion is an amazing art. A page can say the right thing and still feel wrong, and usually it is the type.
Most of what I build outside client work is small tools. A Python dashboard that turns a Screaming Frog crawl into something a client can actually read, and a keyword gap analyzer built on LangChain and local models, because I would rather write something that checks a site properly than open the same five tabs every week. I also make music, and I like building the little instruments and sequencers as much as I like playing them.
I listen to music most of the day. I play Minecraft with my daughter, which is probably my favorite hour of it. I am a Liverpool fan and I have still never made it to Anfield, so that stays on the list. When I want to be outside and not think about anything, I get on my Onewheel.
It is a real pleasure to be in this business, and the fact that I learn something new every day is enriching. Most of the work I am proud of looks like it was not much work at all.