Finding your space
I spent a long time looking for where I was comfortable. Behance is a dead showcase where the design of the case is more important than the work itself. Instagram - show for the sake of likes. VK - a cemetery of ideas. Everything works according to someone else’s rules, and no one asks: Are you okay?
I am a designer, I can do a lot: branding, graphics, 3D, fonts. Everything except websites—I haven’t gone there before. Not because I didn’t want to, but because I felt: this is not about the form, but about the structure, the system, and if you go there, you will need to spend a lot of time to figure it out. And so it happened.
Transition to the internal need to do your own
Over time, it became clear: just “doing design” is not enough for me. I want to think, make mistakes, argue, take a position. And in the profession there is not much room for this. Everyone wants neutral and cool so you can be a “comfortable pro.” With experience, but without character. With taste, but without opinion.
I can’t do this. And if you can’t find a place where you can be yourself, then you need to build it.
Website creation process
The site became not a goal, but a reason. I didn’t sit down to create a “designer website”. I started digging:
- What is even important to me?
- Why don’t I want to be just another designer in the feed?
- What do I want to say?
- How do I want to show this?
- Why am I so disgusted by the idea of doing “like everyone else”?
At some point I just started doing it. Without a clear goal, without structure, without the idea that now it will be beautiful and correct. On the contrary, everything was crooked, long, through errors, meaningless sessions with GPT in VS Code, random iterations. This was not a development process - it was a personal road movie, only instead of a car I had HTML.
Site as a mirror
The site became the place where I was able to gather myself - not as a landing page “what a great designer I am,” but as a person. With your doubts, irritation, conviction, with this constant craving for things that have truth. And it was in this process that for the first time in a long time I felt that I was not doing design, but something more important.
I don’t want to be another designer who makes things “beautiful.” I'm not interested in “how it should be done.” I wonder why. I wonder what difference this makes.
The site turned out to be not a project, but a mirror. Not as a means of promotion, but as a way to understand how I think. Why is it important to me that everything is not just aesthetically pleasing, but meaningful. Why can't I let go until I feel like it's working inside and not just "looks normal".
This place is not the answer to the question “where is the portfolio?” This is not a place where I sell myself. This is where I stopped selling.
## Rethinking the role of the designer
For too long I existed as a service. Designer as a function. A skill that can be used for a while is “make a banner”, “update the logo”.
All this is okay until you start asking questions:
- How does what you do actually live?
- Does it work?
- Does it affect anything?
- Is there anything left after this other than the file on Google Drive?
When you start to think about it, template projects no longer creep into your throat. And the point is not snobbery, but the fact that you can no longer pretend that everything is normal.
You can’t continue to do “just the norm.” You can’t settle for “that’s how it’s done.” You can’t explain to people that “everything is beautiful” if you don’t believe it yourself.
That doesn't make me special. It simply means that I have chosen to live in contradiction but with integrity. Difficult, slow, without guarantees. But at least for real.
Final
Maybe no one will need this place. Maybe no one will read to this line.
But it’s important to me that it exists. That I didn't dissolve. Didn't get lost. Didn't become part of the next template.
And if someone finds themselves in this space, then it’s not in vain.
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