00 | Welcome to The Diary!
A couple of words about me and what you can expect from The Diary.
Welcome to The Diary of a Young Confused Designer! Since the introduction is really important, let’s start with that. My name is Piotr Kuklo, I am an interaction designer, graduated from Umeå Institute of Design.
Before my final study year, I spent half a year at frog design at Munich office and half a year at IDEO Palo Alto office in sunny California. During that year I worked on many projects from different design fields. Starting with future casting, through heavy research projects to designing ready to launch products. Time spent there helped me to better understand design, gave me an opportunity to work with many great designers and helped me to improve a lot. It was an amazing experience!
Since I have a Computer Science background, I enjoy coding as much as I enjoy design and visuals. But it took me a while to figure out how to combine both. I enjoy prototyping for digital products and working on micro-interactions.
If you are curious, you can also see my recent projects at www.piotrkuklo.pl.
Why did I decide to start writing?
First of all, it gives me a lot of pleasure to share my experiences and find out that it could be useful for someone. After writing some short texts about prototyping with Framer, I found all the feedback really motivating and inspiring to work even harder on my skills.
I also couldn’t find articles that will fit my everyday struggles and concerns. There are plenty of great resources from famous and well-known designers but not so much from a person that is just starting working as an interaction designer. Struggling with finding the first job or trying to make the best impression on a first internship. I share those experiences with my friends but I kind of miss this type of content online.
There is also a tiny selfish part. I found that writing helps me to reflect on the past and better understand my learnings and experiences. And since I am not a native speaker this is also my way to improve my writing skills. I hope that with every article my written English will get better and better ;)
What will it be about?
First of all, it will be about design. About design from a perspective of a quite young person that is trying to find a way in the design world. The topics that I would like to write about will probably more focus on peripheral issues of design, not so much about design methods or detailed design patterns. I would love to if reading The Diary will be an activity during your morning coffee or during a break. I hope it will make you relax but at the same time teach you something new or give you a different perspective.
Initial idea is to start with my own experiences and after a while, I would love to include interviews with friends that I met on my design journey to talk about their early years. I hope in some cases you will be able to relate to the stories and in other cases, The Diary will help you to avoid some of the mistakes ;)
Weirdnesses of time
In the beginning, I will be writing more about things from my past experience. Starting with my time in Warsaw when I was working as a graphic designer and at the same time freelancing. We will get to a moment when I packed my whole life and moved to cold cold Sweden and started to learn about a design process and touching upon big topics such as User Center Design.
Then I will love to move to closer events like my amazing intern months and coming back to Sweden to finish my Master Degree. With time, the articles will catch up and I hope The Diary will be describing my present life. Which is starting a job as an Interaction Designer and struggling with shifting the mindset from school projects to client projects.
