Let me take on a small journey through my experiences as a digital creative.
IN one MINUTE
In one minute, the version of me you came here to find:
Senior UI/UX and product designer based in Lisbon. Twenty-six years in. Seventeen of those inside SIC and SIC Notícias, designing for live broadcast and breaking news — interfaces used by operators under pressure, infographics that go on air during elections and crises, real-time tools where errors are visible to a national audience. Before that, a decade across studios in Lisbon and London.
HND from West Herts College in London, 1997. UX/UI certification from EDIT. Lisbon, 2023, with 18/20. Fluent in English. Native Portuguese.
What I’m good at: clarity under time pressure, end-to-end ownership, and defending well-reasoned decisions inside complex teams. What I care about: design that respects the user, work that shows its reasoning, projects that ship.
I’m available for senior roles, contract work, and conversations. If this resonates, the longer story starts below.
Prologue
What brought me to digital was, before anything else, a fascination with communication.
The shape of a message. The way a single sentence, set in the right type, on the right surface, in the right rhythm, could land somewhere a paragraph couldn’t reach. Long before I knew what a designer did for a living, I was already doing the small private versions of it — paying attention to how things were said, why some things were remembered and others forgotten, what made one poster stop you in the street while another disappeared into the wall.
I didn’t have a name for any of this yet. I just knew it was where my attention went.
Baby steps
The first formal step was London, 1995. A Higher National Diploma in Advertising and Marketing Communications at West Herts College. I was seventeen when I arrived. I was nineteen when I left, with a finished diploma and no clear plan beyond the suspicion that I wanted to be near where things were being made.
What followed was the messy useful part of any beginning. Lisbon studios. London studios. Names you’d remember if you were in the same rooms — WeDo, DigitalK, Mediafoundry, Big Fish Design, Vividlime — names that won’t mean much if you weren’t. I was learning by doing, mostly badly at first, occasionally well, the way everyone learns this work when there’s no manual for it.
Digital arrived, for me, as the medium that finally let communication move. Type that animated. Images that responded. Stories that unfolded at the reader’s own pace. I came up through the years when the web was still figuring itself out, and I figured myself out alongside it.
Standing on my own two feet
By the early 2000s I was working with intent rather than just enthusiasm. I’d found my tool — Flash — and I’d found something close to a voice.
Flash, for those who weren’t there: it was how a generation of designers told stories on the internet. Animated, interactive, sound-aware, time-based. It shaped how I think about motion, narrative, and the relationship between design and time. It also had range — you could build a children’s game in the morning and a corporate microsite in the afternoon, and the discipline was the same.
I tried to add formal training to all of this. Design at Universidade Lusófona, between 2003 and 2005. Electronic Arts at Middlesex University, on a return to London in 2006. Each of them taught me something I still use. Neither of them ended with a degree, because the work — actual, paying, deadline-driven work — kept being the thing that needed me more.
This was the part of my career when I learned that I was good at this. Not in the self-promoting sense. In the quieter sense of recognising that the work I was producing was holding up, that clients were coming back, that the small private fascination I’d carried as a teenager had turned into something I could be paid to do.
Here I go again
In 2007, I joined SIC Online. I thought it was a job change. It turned out to be a vocation change.
Designing for a newsroom is not designing for a client. The clock is different. The stakes are different. The relationship between what you make and what the public sees is closer, faster, more consequential. A graphic going on air during an election night, a political crisis, or a national tragedy carries a weight that no commercial brief carries. You learn to make decisions at speed, with editorial responsibility on one shoulder and technical reliability on the other.
Somewhere in those first years, the fascination shifted. Communication on its own stopped being enough. What started to matter more was a quieter ambition: helping people understand things, helping people decide things, helping people get through a complicated screen at a moment when they had no patience for a complicated screen. The work became less about saying something beautifully and more about making something useful. I didn’t lose the first part. The second part just became the reason for the first.
I tried university one more time during these years — Cognitive Science at Universidade de Lisboa, 2012-13 — drawn by what it might tell me about how people actually think, decide, and read screens. Life, in its various shapes, intervened before the degree did. The newsroom kept teaching me what the classroom had started.
Then, slowly through the 2010s and definitively by 2020, Flash disappeared. The browsers stopped supporting it. A decade of craft became unplayable overnight. That kind of thing happens, in this profession, more often than people admit. You build a practice on a tool, the tool goes away, and you find out whether what you actually had was the tool or the thinking underneath it. I found out it was the thinking. I rebuilt around new tools and kept going.
Going back, moving forward
By 2022 I had been working in the same newsroom for fifteen years. I knew the work. I knew myself in the work. What I didn’t know was whether the language I was speaking — the working vocabulary I’d built up over two decades, mostly by instinct and apprenticeship — matched the language the rest of the design world was speaking now.
So I went back to school. The UX/UI bootcamp at EDIT. Lisbon. Eight months. I finished it with 18 out of 20.
What that period gave me wasn’t new instincts; it was names for old ones. Things I’d been doing for years suddenly had a vocabulary, a methodology, a literature. Things I’d been getting wrong became visible as wrong. The bootcamp didn’t make me a UX designer. Twenty years of work had already done that. What the bootcamp did was give me the language to defend the work and to keep learning past it.
And here I am
Aesthetically I lean towards Constructivist structure and Brutalist directness — bold geometry, strong type, work that doesn’t apologise for taking up space.
Beyond aesthetics, I care about how design behaves. Honesty matters to me — in the work, in the brief, in what we tell the user we’re doing. I don’t believe everything goes. A design that misleads the user to hit a conversion target is not good design that happens to be ethically uncomfortable; it’s bad design wearing a good suit. I’ve spent nearly two decades in a newsroom, where the line between informing and manipulating is drawn every day, in real time, in front of an audience. Some of that has stayed with me. The user is not a target. The reader is not a metric. The brief is not the only voice in the room.
What I’m interested in now: design that respects the user’s intelligence, work that shows its reasoning, and projects that ship. Twenty-six years in, I know what a well-defended decision looks like. I know what it costs to maintain one inside an institution. And I know when it’s time to take that knowledge somewhere new.
I’m available for senior UX/UI roles, contract work, and conversations.