I was nineteen and had no idea what to do with my life, so I picked something that felt like a safe bet. It didn’t take long to realise it wasn’t for me. But here’s the thing about studying language — even when you walk away from it, it doesn’t walk away from you.

Understanding how language is structured, how persuasion works at a mechanical level, how certain words land and others slide off — that knowledge rewired the way I think. It still runs underneath everything I design.

I ended up in B2B sales almost by accident. Construction industry, interior decoration — proper selling, face to face, with people who had budgets to justify and bosses to impress. I spent years doing that, and somewhere along the way I fell deep into behavioural psychology and the science of persuasion. Cialdini, Bandler, Tracy — not as casual reading, but as tools I needed for the next morning.

It changed me permanently. I stopped seeing design as decoration. Every layout became a sales conversation. Every slide became an argument. Every line of text became something that doesn’t just sit on a page — it paints a picture in someone’s mind. And those words need to be chosen carefully.

After a few years in sales, I wanted to test myself in what was still, back then, a fledgling industry — digital marketing. I joined one of Poland’s top search marketing agencies, running Google Ads campaigns alongside SEO specialists. Around the same time, a high school friend and I started a blog that became our testing ground for everything — marketing, social media, design. At its peak, we had over twenty thousand readers a month.

But design was always there, pulling at me.

Eventually I stopped treating it as a side interest and let it become what it always was. That was over fifteen years ago. Since then I’ve built brands and visual systems across Europe. I’ve designed collateral and presentations that have been shown on every continent except Antarctica — and I still want to fill that gap.

I spent a decade with one company, starting as a designer and finishing as Head of Brand — responsible for everything from the logo to the exhibition stand to the Word templates that two hundred people used every day without thinking twice about where they came from.