Entering design

My obsession with Lego, combined with hundreds of hours of academic drawing and composition, naturally led me to study at the Ural Academy of Architecture and Arts.

I chose industrial design because it sat right at the intersection of visual craft, engineering, and usability. The education was incredibly broad: one day I was designing posters or furniture, the next drawing combustion engines or working with electronics.

It was also there that I first got introduced to interface design.

Communication

In 2017, advertising felt like the most accessible way into professional design. I joined the marketing team at E96, a major online marketplace, and later moved to Motiv, a mobile operator.

I still remember the shock of seeing a huge banner I had designed published on the marketplace homepage and suddenly exposed to thousands of real people. It was the first time design stopped feeling like an exercise and became something others actually experienced.

That feeling made me want to get much better, fast. After work, I kept studying typography and composition, experimenting with new tools, and trying to raise the quality of everything I made.

UX/UI

By late 2019, I realized I wanted to move beyond static visuals and get back to designing products people actually use.

UX/UI design was rapidly gaining momentum at the time, and I joined MyStand, a studio focused on designing B2B SaaS products for Western markets. That was my entry point into product design, and into the kind of complex software I still enjoy working on today.

Product

MyStand and Squad (another agency) gave me a huge amount of hands-on experience across different digital products.

Over time, though, I realized that finishing a project was no longer enough for me. I wanted to stay with the product, see how decisions performed over time, study usage and metrics, and keep improving what we shipped.

That meant joining a product team. In 2022, that team became Revealbot, now Bïrch, a digital advertisement automation tool. Advertising came back into the picture. This time from the product side.

Barcelona

After years of working on English-speaking products for a Western market, I was happy to accept Bïrch invitation to move to Barcelona in 2023. I wanted to become a part of an international environment and learn how to work in cross-functional team in-person.

On-site, my growth increased rapidly, until I became a Senior product designer, leading a team responsible for ad launch and analytics tools.