The Origin

For as long as I can remember if I didn’t have a ball at my feet or was running on the streets of Brazil, I was drawing with a pencil in my hand. I remember drawing Pokémon and Knights of the Zodiac (an anime extremely popular in Brazil) for hours. Art was such a huge part of my life that I would go in drawing competitions, and in middle school one of my clay sculpture was displayed in a mall near my house for a few days. But somewhere along the line, I lost the passion I once had and focused all my energy in sports.

Platoon Ten-Hut!

I tried following in my father’s footsteps as a mechanical engineer, but I quickly learned that I had no aptitude or desire to become one. Feeling somewhat lost, I joined the Marines. I was rapidly promoted to PFC or Private First Class, and in the two years after I left boot camp, I picked the rank of Lance Corporal and then became Corporal.

As a young Corporal, I was assigned as the Field Mess NCOIC (Non-Commissioned Officer In Charge). As the Field Mess NCOIC, I had the freedom to experiment with ways to make the food more pleasing and improve the overall sanitation while in garrison and on deployments. In Afghanistan, I designed a cup dispenser out of cardboard box that allowed the marines to twist and pull the cups and only one would come out. I called that invention the Twist n’ Pull.

My other design was dubbed the Shake n’ Take, the Shake n' Take was a plastic utensil dispenser that the marines would shake and any plastic utensil set that was stuck inside would fall, allowing the other sets to remain clean.

I've Fallen and I Can't Get Up!

Once I left the marines I immediately started attending school for architecture. While I was in architecture school I was doing exceptionally well, however, after a few years, the school decided to terminate the architecture program due to the low student enrollment. When I received that notice, I panicked and dropped out soon after.

Luckily a few months later I decided to sell the house I had bought in SoCal during the recession and I used that money to start day trading. Initially, things went well, but after a few desperate moves cost me greatly, I decided to cut my losses.

UX? What's That?

With the end of my day trading journey, I decided to learn more about front-end development since I already had some experience with HTML and CSS. But the more I learned about web development, words like UX, UI, Information Architecture started coming up in my searches, and the more I realized how much UX fit with my personality. I spent hours, sometimes even seeing the sunrise, looking at websites from other designers and companies, and thinking of how my next project would look.

I started doing more research on UX design and discovered how similar it was to Architecture. Suddenly I realized that I was naturally attracted to design, and my journey to becoming a UX designer began.

Want to know more about me? I still have a lot more to tell. So let's connect!