I followed an old dream and moved to Japan to study Japanese literature. A year in Kyoto turned out to be training for the work I do now, though I didn’t know it at the time: reading what a text is actually doing underneath what it appears to say. Systems, symbols, the distance between the stated thing and the real one. My first creative job happened there, almost by accident, and that accident decided the rest.

 Back in Ukraine I had a degree in Japanese literature, rent to pay, and no experience in a field full of people who had plenty. So I taught myself. Illustration first — drawing was what I’d done anyway, since childhood — then everything around it: composition, type, colour, 3D, the craft of making an image do something. It took a few years to notice that what held my attention wasn’t the image but the decisions behind it. An illustration answers the brief. Design decides whether the brief was right. I moved across, and stayed.

 In 2022 the full-scale invasion brought my family to France. I began again in a new country, a new language and a new market — the third time I’d started from the beginning, and the first time I knew how.

 Since then I’ve worked on products where the first five minutes decide everything: onboarding, activation, the moment someone chooses to stay or leave. Most recently at Readdle, on Spark. Alongside it I founded Maison, a connected object for scent and light — I grew up watching my mother build a company on her own, so I had some idea what I was signing up for. It taught me hardware, patents, and how much of design happens before anything gets drawn.

 I now live near Montpellier, and I’m looking for a team building something with real ambition behind it, where design is part of deciding what gets built rather than how it gets dressed.