Kerning from the best — 5 minutes with Paulo Dziobczenski
What does a typical morning look like for you?
– Take my daughter to daycare (it is still open here in Finland).
– Come back home to have breakfast and coffee, watching some football highlights from previous evening.
–Look e-mails, social media and other ‘small’ stuff, as a warm-up to more serious things to do during the day.
– Actual work: it can be research, writing, design, etc.
What has been your design journey?
– I started studying Graphic Design in 2002, in the south of Brazil.
– Worked as a Graphic designer in in-house studio and design agencies in Brazil between 2003 and 2013.
– Got a master degree in design management (2012) and worked as a design lecturer in 2012 and 2013.
– 2014: Moved to Finland — because of the…weather? — to work on my PhD and as a lecturer at Aalto University.
– 2020: Still in Finland, I’ve recently launched designcareer.co, a place to share information about career development in design.
What do you find yourself having to repeatedly convince others of?
Why design matters and why designers are relevant for companies. I even wrote the content for an online course to talk about design for non-designers: https://designbits.aalto.fi/ (only for Aalto University students at the moment, we plan to release an open version in 2021).
Do you have a mantra?
Now I think I should have one!
Where do you want to go?
After 2020, making a list of goals seems to be a dangerous task, but let’s try:
– Develop the designcareer.co further. I want it to be a place where people can find relevant information about design career growth.
– Finish that (damn) PhD thesis
Who do you look up to?
I am a big fan of the work done by Fabricio Teixeira and Caio Braga in running the UX Collective. It is such an important work for the design community to have a place to learn from others designers’ experiences. Also, the UX collective is an important forum for authors (like me) to spread the word about what they think about design.
What’s your remote desk setup?
Nothing fancy: Macbook pro + HP monitor borrowed from Aalto University
During the day, I keep rotating between places to work at home:
– Kitchen desk.
– (Improvised) standing desk at my daughters bedroom for meetings.
– (Improvised) office in the bedroom.
– Sofa in the living room.
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A selection of our other interviews:
- Designer voices, London: Losing passion and regaining your drive
- Microsoft’s Charu Choudha on focus, productivity, and digital adoption
- 5 minutes with landing page expert Rob Hope
P.s. we’ve teamed up with DesignLab to offer out their courses to 8px readers. Want to learn UX from some of the industry masters? They offer both short and long courses, where you’re teamed up with mentors from Github, Dropbox and the BBC.
