Seven years, three kinds of work

I was drawing logos before anyone told me it was a career. School-age, doing graphic design for whoever asked, mostly because I liked the part where you redo something for the fifth time and it finally sits right.

I was never much for the academic side of things. What I had was an eye, and the patience to keep going until a thing looked correct. So when I went to SLIIT to read for a BSc in Information Technology, it was less a change of direction than pointing the same instinct at software.

That combination turned out to be the useful part. Knowing roughly how a thing is built, and caring how it looks, is a narrower overlap than it sounds. I started as a UX Engineer, spent time at Virtusa, and I am now Associate UX Lead at Altrium. Seven years in.

Most of my thinking at work now goes into interfaces for agentic and autonomous systems — software that acts on your behalf. The interesting question there is not how to make it look good. It is how a person stays in control of something that is off doing things without them, and how you show that honestly rather than hiding it behind a spinner.

Alongside that, the brand work never stopped, and interiors came later, out of helping people fix rooms that were not comfortable to live in.

Three different-looking things. Underneath they are one job: make it calm, make it work, make it worth looking at. A logo, an interface and a living room all fail in the same way — when they are busier than they need to be.