Twenty years, three jobs

I trained as a graphic designer when the deliverable was still a printed sheet. When the web arrived I moved over, and the thing that stuck was the constraint: a page has to work on someone else's screen, someone else's connection, someone else's Tuesday.

Since then I have worked from agencies, from in-house product teams and, for the last few years, on my own from Madrid. The graphic work never left: it keeps turning up between the digital projects, which is why it sits in the same archive as everything else.

There is a branch along the way that looks out of place and explains a great deal. I was part of the Djehuty Team as a specialist in Egyptian ceramics: the Spanish-Egyptian archaeological mission in Luxor, a CSIC project. I worked for them from 2006 to 2019, seven of those years as a contracted researcher. I dug, classified material and signed its ceramics reports; I also ran its website that whole time. I am no longer part of the Team, but that is where a habit comes from that shows up in everything else: a fact has to be checkable, and if something isn’t known, you say so.

I write the front-end for most of what I design. Not because designers must code, but because the last ten per cent — focus rings, motion, how a layout survives a very long word — is where the design either happens or quietly disappears.