About Me
The personal bullet points:
I was born in the Philippines in the southernmost part of the archipelago, rural enough so that we had 65 kids in my third grade class and roaches and snakes occasionally made their way into the classroom. I loved it.
I thought I’d grow up to be an illustrator. I was drawing as soon as I was old enough to pick up a pencil and I never really stopped. Even now, having mostly exchanged my graphite for Figma, I still doodle. Rustily.
I’m a casual runner, working up to hitting 10k. (It will happen soon, now that I’m not confined indoors to boring treadmills!) This love of running has influenced me to build a pure running app with an engineer friend of mine, named JustRun.
I travel overseas twice a year. I love all things strange, so cemeteries, urban legends walking tours, and forensic museums are usually on my itinerary. My best travel memories include the Siriraj Medical Museum in Bangkok (which I personally found more memorable than most of the museums in Amsterdam), and Montjuic Cemetery in Barcelona (serenity in the middle of the Spanish Christmas season).
I built my own gaming PC 2-3 years ago, mostly so I could play Mass Effect and Fallout with mods that I personally made, like long hair for my characters and shirts with the logos I wanted. It was done on a budget though, so now my GPU is showing its age. I’ve since bought a gaming laptop.
I love sports—NBA nowadays mostly, though I paid more attention to the NFL back when the NFC East was interesting and there was that Manning-Brady rivalry. I think that initial love for sports has transitioned neatly into a fascination with eSports.
Horror movies. I love horror movies and the like. Who doesn’t love all things weird and creepy and inexplicable?
Me (black cap, second row on the leftmost side) with the PSX Southeast Asia event team, aka one of the best and most hardworking guys on the planet. Oh yes, that’s Detroit: Become Human‘s very charming couple Brian Dechart and Amelia Rose Blaire at the top row.
And now the professional stuff:
I got a degree in computer arts, but as a kid I wanted to become an illustrator. In middle/high school I learned how to code websites and create motion graphics, and after I began working I learned the basics of Maya, 3DSMax, and Javascript, and then got thrown headfirst into the world of product design. So while my entire design focus and obsession right now is the design language and visual communication to get people to interact successfully with a product, all those older skills have definitely served me well.
When I got kicked into the deep end of the UX pool about five years ago, I think the fact that I was very familiar with HTML, CSS, and Javascript made it easier for me to start swimming. It does help to be able to look at an interface and know the foundations and possible behavior of the code that governs it.
I’m very fortunate to have shipped products currently in use around the world, and see how people interact with them. I’ve worked in small teams and large ones; in small teams I wore multiple hats and was involved in all aspects of the product lifecycle, and when I was in huge teams I had the privilege of learning alongside some of the most skilled PMs, engineers, content strategists, and fellow designers in the Bay Area. And every now and then I realize how lucky I am that I’ve had the fortune of genuinely enjoying the work I’ve done, whether it was in social media, or gaming, or even small personal projects, whether they go out into the world for others to use or not.
At the moment, my current design point of intense interest is behavioral design: how do we empower people like you and me to make the right decisions using our own accumulated knowledge of design and human psychology? How do we make processes easier, more inclusive, less intimidating with our artistic skills and our ability to empathize?
One of my favorite things about product design is that it keeps evolving, and I doubt that I’ll ever be too tired to stop learning.
