Alexey

Design has been part of my life for a long time, probably longer than anything else I do professionally. But I never really wanted to explain everything I do through design.

I never had much interest in building a career in one particular profession. I was more interested in trying different things, understanding how they worked, earning enough to live, and eventually using all of this experience to make something of my own.

I started working when I was around fourteen. First I washed cars. After that, there were many different things.

I delivered pizza, laid paving stones and turf, worked as a cleaner and painter, taught English to children, translated, took photographs, worked as an MC and event host, prepared hookahs, managed social media and wrote copy. I worked in construction, customer support, a maritime crewing company, and, at one point, as a travel manager in Namibia.

Some of these jobs lasted longer than others. Some were things I never imagined I would do. I was usually not afraid to start something I had no experience with and figure it out on the way.

For a long time, work was mainly how I paid for my life. I wasn’t particularly interested in making a career inside somebody else’s company or spending ten years becoming one very specific kind of specialist.

What interested me much more was collecting experience from different places and, somehow, using it to build my own things. Those things usually existed somewhere in parallel, while normal work paid for rent and food.

I grew up in a small city in Russia near the Ukrainian border, and spent a lot of my childhood on both sides of it. I never really thought of that border as something separating two different worlds. For me, it was one familiar space, with shared history, language, family and culture. I didn’t feel a need to choose one side of that heritage over the other.

The environment around me was fairly small. School wasn’t particularly calm either. Many people around me were getting into fights, drinking early, and generally following a version of life that I understood quite early I didn’t want for myself. Not becoming part of that world was one of the more difficult parts of growing up.

I started playing piano when I was six and later finished music school. For many years, classical music and the piano gave me another place to be when I didn’t particularly like the reality around me.

In 2004, my parents saved for about a year to buy me my first computer, a Pentium 4 with Windows XP. That computer opened a much bigger world.

At first, I mostly consumed whatever I could find: games, music, films, forums, websites, and conversations with people from places I had never seen. Wanting to understand more of this world was one reason I started learning languages. At the same time, I experimented with websites, music and video, and somewhere around sixth grade became particularly interested in web design.

As a child, I watched History Channel constantly and was completely sure I would become an archaeologist. Later, I realised I had no idea how I was supposed to make a living from archaeology, so I chose languages instead. They gave me something structured to study, but also another way to understand other countries and cultures.

I studied linguistics and spent parts of my university years in Germany. I travelled, went to exhibitions, concerts and music events, and saw a cultural life very different from the one I knew at home. It was probably one of the first times I understood that many things I had always considered normal were not universal at all. They were simply one possible way to live.

Translation was interesting to me, but there was one problem: I was still mostly working with things made by other people. I wanted to make more of my own.

When I came back from Germany, I wanted to create some of the cultural life I had seen there in my own city. So in 2018, I started a music festival.

I developed it over several years. At its biggest, it had more than a thousand visitors, up to five stages and around twenty DJs. During the same period, I organised many other music events.

A team of more than twenty people eventually formed around the project. I hadn’t started the festival because I wanted to manage people. But at some point there were twenty people around me, and somebody had to organise all of it. We built the festival together.

I did most of the visual and digital work myself: identity, website, posters, content, video, motion graphics and animation. I also experimented with audiovisual work, projections and visuals for spaces and performances.

A large part of what I know today comes from those years. The project constantly needed things I didn’t know how to do yet. So I learned them because there was an actual reason to learn them.

This was also how I started getting my first client projects in branding and web design.

I had already been making websites, music and video for years before the festival. But this was the first project where I had to make all of these things work together, and where real people would actually arrive, see everything, hear everything and experience what we had made. That changes how you think about your work.

The work I had built around music came to an end during Covid. Then, in 2022, I left Russia and moved to Georgia because I didn’t want to be part of the war.

My family background is Ukrainian. I grew up in Russia, and I also consider that part of who I am. I don’t want to choose one part of myself against another.

Leaving meant being away from my family and from the places where I had spent most of my life. Finding work in another country was only one part of starting again.

I speak Russian, English, German and Ukrainian, and I feel much closer to the idea of being simply a person of the world. I can see a friend in someone who is ready to see a friend in me. Where this person was born or what language they speak comes later.

Moving to Georgia wasn’t part of some career plan. I simply needed to understand how to build a life there, and design was one of the things I already knew how to do and could continue doing from almost anywhere.

For the next few years, I mostly built e-commerce websites. I took work where I could find it and continued doing other things in parallel when necessary.

Freelance gave me more control, but over time I became increasingly interested in everything around the design itself. What exactly are we building? Why does somebody need it? How do people find it? What happens after we launch it? How does the business behind it actually work?

I started 48hrs, a design agency for small businesses. It brings together websites, social graphics and presentations. Another part of building something of my own, this time around the work I had been doing for other people.

I had spent years learning different things because my own projects needed them. Now I started seeing how these things could work together. That gradually moved me away from thinking only in terms of individual design projects and towards products, systems, software, media and businesses.

Now I’m building my own products, businesses and media projects. Most of them start from things I already spend too much time doing anyway: organising information, designing, collecting things and researching subjects that interest me.

This website is one of them. I’ve been working on it in different forms for years. I write guides and articles, build collections, experiment with how information should be organised, and develop the design system behind all of it.

Some projects begin as systems I make for myself. I build something for my notes, research, ideas or work, use it for some time, change it twenty times, and eventually realise that parts of it could probably be useful to somebody else too.

Then comes the more difficult part: making it understandable outside my own head. Something can be completely logical to me and look like the work of a madman to another person.

In design, I’m interested in how everything belongs together: identity, typography, interface, content, components and the system behind them. I’m building both services and products around this approach, including things that people can continue using without needing me every time something changes.

I also have a habit of collecting things. Websites, software, tools, visual references, books, articles, strange little resources that might become useful five years later. Instead of pretending I will stop doing this, I’m turning some of these collections into directories with enough structure and context to make them useful to other people too.

One of those collections is now live: my YouTube thumbnail library. I collect references there and organise them by category, creator and collection, with links back to the original videos.

I’m also building media projects with writing, images, music and video. They don’t all have to be about design. History, social processes, economics, technology, humanity, space, film and music are subjects I can spend unreasonable amounts of time reading and thinking about too.

My personal YouTube channel is another part of this. I want it to be a place where I can show projects while they are still being built, talk about what I’m learning, document the process and share more than just polished final results.

Some of these things are businesses. Some I sell. Some I share for free. And some probably should never become businesses at all. I don’t want to monetise every interest I have. Sometimes making something because I want it to exist is enough.

I tend to build systems

I don’t really separate all these things when I work. If I’m building a website, sooner or later I start thinking about the content, how people will find it, how it will be updated, what happens after launch and what needs to exist behind it.

If I’m making media, I start thinking about how the material should be organised and how to build a process that doesn’t require inventing everything again every week.

So I build systems for my own work and then continuously change them while using them. Sometimes this means connecting several tools. Sometimes it means removing half of them.

I occasionally build a system for something that probably needed a folder. But this is also how I’ve learned to make different interests useful together instead of choosing one profession and pretending the others don’t exist.

What I actually want from independence is fairly simple: more control over my time.

That doesn’t mean doing everything alone. The festival would never have become what it was without the people who worked on it with me. I like working with other people when there is something worth building together.

Freelance gave me more control than a regular job, but there was still the same basic problem: finish one project, find another project, repeat. I’m trying to build work that doesn’t completely reset with every new client.

I want enough time to go deeply into a project. To spend several weeks learning something that has no obvious practical use. To travel. To be with people I care about. To change direction without feeling that I have just destroyed a ten-year career plan.

The products, businesses and systems I’m building are supposed to make more of this possible. If one day maintaining all of them takes every hour I have, then I’ve probably managed to build myself another job.

For a long time, I was much more comfortable publishing nothing. This website is partly an attempt to change that.

I write about what I’m building, what I’m learning, what works, what doesn’t, and the things I change my mind about along the way.