Every line here
came from somewhere.

00

Where it started

Twelve or thirteen, most of my time spent on a computer. A gaming community introduced me to people who cared about software and design, and that pushed me from consuming digital things to making them.

Photoshop first. Then Illustrator, Premiere, After Effects: courses, tutorials, and a lot of practice. HTML and CSS interested me too, but the visual side was more seductive, so the code branch stayed dormant for years.

01

From design to audience

I built a Telegram channel about film and television. It started as something to do and turned into roughly twenty thousand members, ad slots, cross-promotion deals and a network.

It was my first real education in distribution. Making something is not enough. You have to know what an audience actually wants, when to publish it, and how to borrow reach from someone else. My first income from digital work came at fifteen.

02

A connection becomes a client

One of the relationships from that period turned into paid work. Petchi, a pet food and treat brand, already had a visual system and templates.

My job was to produce inside someone else’s language, not my own. Hold the consistency, move faster, and hand over something the client can actually use. This ran alongside my first months at ELOvisa.

See the work →

03

I asked to start as an intern

I had skills, projects and income, but no company on my record. So I proposed entering ELOvisa as an intern first.

I wanted to see how a real company works. What a deadline is. What approval means. How a campaign travels from idea to execution, and how design inside a business differs from design for yourself. Almost no creative control at the start, and one of the most useful periods I have had.

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04

Content Designer

The internship converted after a month. ELOvisa was rebuilding its digital activity, service packages were firming up, content volume climbed, and my scope grew with it.

The question I was asking myself quietly changed. It stopped being how do I design this, and became how do I communicate this better.

05

Lead Digital Designer

Social, campaigns, brochures, web content, podcast visuals, studio content, offer presentation, reporting and creative direction all arrived at once. I worked directly with senior management on decisions that were not only visual.

The KPI was never likes. It was inbound enquiries and phone calls. So hierarchy, CTA, offer clarity, contact placement and distribution stopped being separate problems and became one problem: conversion. Campaigns ran as variations across different pages and formats, which is where I first met iteration as a discipline.

See the ELOvisa work →

06

A second branch opens: immigration

Because of what ELOvisa did, I sat close to the immigration and legal teams. Application processes, client journeys, document flows, service packages, the shape of the whole domain.

I was not a lawyer there. But the domain knowledge was real, and it went quiet for three years before returning in PF Apply and becoming central at Gate NL.

07

Simorgh, and context switching

At ELOvisa I lived inside one brand. At Simorgh I worked across several clients and internal products, mostly execution: enter a context fast, continue a system that already exists.

Software one day, education the next, then something engineering-related, without making them all look like each other. Less strategic ownership than ELOvisa, but it built a different muscle.

See the work →

08

Web stops being a side skill

I applied to Xino for a social media role. They wanted someone more senior for it. In the interview I talked about WordPress, CMS work, HTML and CSS instead.

They gave me the web designer test. I passed. The line that opened when I was thirteen came back to the centre of my career, this time as the job.

09

Xino Digital: ten to twelve storefronts

Products were identified through advertising intelligence, then needed a store fast so the marketing team could test them. My job was the entire web side: architecture, product and landing pages, responsive behaviour, visual assets, troubleshooting.

Sometimes a few days. Sometimes about a week. A site was not going to sit in design review for three months. It had to reach a state where a product could be tested. Around ten to twelve stores, in a direct team of seven or eight. For the first time, what I designed became a functioning commercial website.

See the work →

10

German Term: direction, not production

Here I was not designing every post. I worked on content direction, advertising, campaign planning, quality control and how a new immigration service line was positioned and communicated.

One decision mattered more than the rest: stop depending on personal-brand content alone and add educational and current-affairs formats. Six of those reels did about 3.1 million views, a hundred thousand likes and five thousand comments. Content that an audience genuinely wants creates its own distribution.

See the work →

11

Turin

I moved to Italy. My old LinkedIn turned this into a career break, which was wrong. It was a pivot.

I started Global Law and Transnational Legal Studies at the University of Turin, and decided to take the technical side of my work seriously.

12

Learning front-end properly this time

I already knew HTML and CSS, and had started JavaScript at Xino. After moving I followed all of it structurally instead of opportunistically: responsive development, JavaScript, Git, GitHub, React.

Codecademy Front-End Engineer Professional Certification, August 2025. The point was not the certificate. It was that web stopped meaning WordPress, and started meaning version control, components, front-end logic and debugging.

13

PF Apply: the immigration line returns

The branch that opened at ELOvisa came back, independent this time. PF Apply launched on 25 April 2025, focused on study migration to Italy and Germany.

I was no longer marketing someone else’s migration service. I ran cases end to end: client communication, evaluation, documents, guidance, application support, plus the website and digital presence. Small and private on purpose, but it converted old domain knowledge into my own service experience.

See the work →

14

AI enters development

Around the same time, AI started taking a real role in how I build. At first it was simple: prompt, implementation, test, correct.

CODO Flashcard was the first serious attempt: a desktop app for my own language learning, built with Tauri 2, React, TypeScript, Vite, Rust and SQLite, and open sourced. It proved I could leave the boundaries of websites. But the workflow was not mature. It was mostly vibe coding, and I was not a Rust developer.

See the work →

15

Gate NL, where the threads met

The first project where nearly every previous thread arrived at the same point: design, web, immigration, legal knowledge, content, marketing, front-end and custom development.

A bilingual, RTL legal and migration platform for Iranian users interested in the Netherlands. Brand and visual system, information architecture, WordPress build on Elementor Pro with custom HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP, plus GNL MAG as a structured publication environment.

The feature that mattered most for what came next was the PhD opportunity system: custom WordPress and PHP with dynamic filtering, university structures, offer management and internal admin tooling. That became the foundation of Opportunita. Beyond the site, the service itself was designed as a structured case lifecycle rather than an unstructured consultancy, and I contributed to that legal and operational framework.

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16

G Café

A small problem, precisely stated. Paper menus, weak mobile connections, and an owner worried a digital menu would be slow.

I did the wireframes, UI, UX and direction; implementation ran largely through AI with me supervising, testing and correcting. Next.js 14, React, Directus as headless CMS, deployed in Docker containers behind Nginx and Cloudflare. My first genuinely good combination of design ownership and AI-assisted modern implementation.

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17

SantaFe Piercing: back to pure design

While the rest of my work got more technical, I designed a PDF jewellery catalogue for a piercing artist in Turin, meant to be used with walk-in clients.

Cover, navigation, categories, product grids, tools, location, editorial layout. A useful reminder that technical growth is not supposed to replace visual skill.

See the work →

18

Opportunita: website becomes platform

Gate NL had exposed a problem. PhD offers were scattered, and users were checking dozens of university sites. Then the questions got bigger. Why only the Netherlands, why not real search, why are resumes and offers not connected, why are applications not managed in the same place.

A small feature became an independent product. Development started July 2026; the first public-ready version landed 5 August 2026.

And the questions changed character. Not how do I build this page, but what is the source of truth, how are duplicates detected, how do public data and private user data stay separated, where is AI allowed to interpret at all.

Open the six phases →

19

Five threads, one point

Design came from gaming and early graphics, through Petchi, ELOvisa and Simorgh, into UI and web. Marketing came from a Telegram channel, through ELOvisa campaigns and German Term. Web came from teenage HTML, through Xino and structured training. Law came from ELOvisa, through PF Apply and a degree in Turin. AI came from experiments, through CODO and Codex, into agentic workflows.

They meet here. Which is why I do not describe myself as a designer who later learned to code, or a developer who used to do graphics.

At the start of my career I was focused on making outputs. Now I think mostly about building the systems that make outputs possible.