What I do

I am a web designer/developer/UX designer and occasionally a print designer. With 8 years of experience and thousands of hours spent planing, designing and coding websites. My favourite field is e-commerce sites and content rich websites. I also enjoy programming and playing with jQuery. I have decent knowledge of PHP, MVC frameworks and I am a big fan of Ruby on Rails. However, I never wanted to be a hardcore programmer. And due to my character I would never become one. I do it just to satisfy my curiosity and to understand how stuff works. And obviously knowing how stuff works helps me in creating better websites.

Education

I started to go to school a year after people of my country made the decision that Communism is not the way to live in the modern world. It took a while to rewrite books and find out that not all the stuff is invented by Russians and Cubans are not the only normal nation outside the Berlin Wall. Sure, sarcasm is not the only thing I learned in school and university. I learned a bit more... For example to read, to write and that, as the matter of fact, content is everything. Wait a second, in fact I learned that already before school...

Why I do What I do.

I don't really remember how it started and why, but for some reason I was always fascinated by advertising. My father worked in Germany and when he came back for holidays for those couple of times in a year, he always had a bunch of TV Spielfilm issues with him. I didn't understand a word. But as you know - best ads have no language. And I knew exactly what they were about.

In my late teenage years I was surrounded by many cool people of various professions - musicians, entrepreneurs and art people, and I thought that advertising is where this all comes together. I wanted to be cool, too. Maybe remembering these German adverts I started to be an ad geek. Since I never knew anyone who was in this business or even close to it - it was hard to figure out how to get in. I simply started designing ads.

A Little about my career

I started my career when I was 17. Made outdoor advertising. Actually, made two - one was rejected. Anyway, it made me the coolest guy in town (about 50 people... counting the bus driver). I was doing this job for 4 weeks and thought of my self as a super talented guy who knows everything. But this type of work didn't give me satisfaction.

Soon after that I started working in "somebody knew somebody who needed a designer" type of company. Actually, the job was very interesting and I had many responsibilities. No, really! I learned something new every single day. But still, I couldn’t get this feeling - Yeah, this is the thing I want to do for the rest of my life.

But one day my manager said to me - "You’re gonna make a website". I told him I didn't know how to make websites. He replayed to me excited - "I will teach you!". Not much later I found out it was his first website as well. Anyway, we made a pretty cool flash intro, though. I knew - interactive is my thing. With one site in my portfolio and good software skills I gained spending hours and hours in Freehand and Photoshop designing for print I decided to move to web-design. I sent five letters (aka ABCDE testing) to five best know web agencies in Latvia and got lucky. I received some test work from one company. I was asked to redesign the Latvia's national post website (imagine Royal Mail in scale of 1:20). It was a disaster. But a week later the same company asked me to design a brochure for one of their clients. This time I knew how to do it - I got another shot.

A few month later I was designing websites for the leading companies in the region. I was lucky to work with companies like Satchi&Satchi, DHL, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, A. Le Coq and many other internationally and locally known brands. I was only 20. I was happy. And irrational.

Killed ambition

Everything went really good. So good, that I decided to make my own company. My business plan was to have my own office and people working for me. Then I would have my own ad agency. I managed it pretty fast, but as I soon found out - you need a little bit more to succeed. I worked for two years, had enough, closed my business and left the country. I decided to move to a place where I could learn from the best and hopefully work for them, too.

New beginning in London

In June 2008 I stepped on the English soil. Settled in London and got a job as a graphic designer in telecoms. Their main business was to provide cheap international calls. In fact they were one of the leaders in this. I didn't really speak any English. I had never before worked in an international company. I had never before dealt with so many different nationalities and cultures. Imagine a guy who lived in a small village in ex-socialist country and suddenly he’s in one of biggest cities in the world. And it all happened in just one day - Friday, 13 of June, 2008. Nothing symbolic - simply the tickets were cheaper.

What’s next

I still have a dream about an ad agency. But it shouldn't be mine for the next 15 years at least. Print will be dead. Television as we now it today will die too. We are experiencing the biggest changes in the industry since 60'. Prime time is when you take your iPhone out of your pocket, open your Twitter, read your emails. And in the summer of 2022 people of the people’s republic will watch Superbowl on YouTube sitting in Starbucks somewhere in Tibet at 4 clock in the morning. And I will sell something to them.

Outside the work

I had so many hobbies I even can't remember. At the age of 12 I was running hurdles. I was playing chess a lot. There was a time when I was creating electronic devices like amplifiers and radios. I simply wanted to understand the magic. I was seriously into in-line skating. A bloody painful hobby. For about a year I was crazy about poetry and theater. I was acting in the schools theatre and did some festivals. Then I switched to drawing. I can even draw the Simpsons. Then I played solo-guitar in a band called Keine Ahnung. Later became an amateur photographer and I did some commercial photos for clients.

I do have some constants, too. I love to play and watch others play tennis. And I love to read books and listen to audio-books. Anything but fiction. Something like Malcolm Gladwell or Seth Godin. But the most important thing in my life (besides people) is - as you might imagine - Internet and design. I can spend hours pushing pixels or looking how other people have pushed theirs.

I Want more! Do You?

If you want to know something more or think something esle should be covered feel free to write me.