Connecting The Dots

I think in systems.

It’s painfully apparent now, but it took longer to figure out than I’d like to admit. What sparked this revelation was going back through my work experience — one by one, every job I’ve ever had. I wanted to revise it for my personal website, and my LinkedIn profile, so they more accurately represented my work at each company. The title and the job description would label me a “trainer”,  a “motion designer”, an “instructor”. While all of these were true, there was one that never surfaced over any of them, and it was the true definition of how I contributed to every team I was part of, and every project I took up.

But before I get into the nitty-gritty of how I figured this out, let’s talk about what thinking in “systems” actually means. 

In brand design, it’s a logo by itself versus everything that surrounds it — how it’s applied, structured, the pieces that make it up, and the rules it follows for every spot it lands on.

In motion design, it’s delivering a single video file versus versions fit for various channels, a library of motion elements that can be reused — lower thirds, animated logo stings, transitions — and motion curves applied consistently, so everything that’s shipped carries a coherent look and feel across the board.

A single entity, or a system of entities working in concert to scale and amplify its effect. That’s the gist.

Here’s how I applied that principle at each job:

At my first “official” job at Nokia, I was a product trainer. I was meant to create training materials — mostly presentations — to onboard new team members for one of the company’s major projects. I had to help people finish the training while sticking to a big corporation’s limiting brand book. I did that, but I also built a reward system akin to game principles I’ve seen across multiple video games. The one I’m most proud of was the option to go down different paths, or get different outcomes, based on your answers. Another was accruing score across several trainings, and in the form of a leaderboard that did not affect whether the training was completed, but gave bragging rights to the record holders.

Next came Tech Tour, with its 24 events that ran throughout the year. As a motion designer, I was officially meant to create video content, but the role was never firmly defined. That’s why I instead built the visual system for the identities of their flagship events — from event covers to motion elements to promote the events, support the registration process, and announce winners. 

What came up from this was a system I didn’t expect. I had to brand 200 startup presentation videos with intro and outro animations within 48 hours. Every startup had to record and send their video by a deadline. Most would submit theirs on time, but some would not. That’s a lot of videos on an extremely tight deadline for a single person to handle. My experiments showed they’d also come in all kinds of formats, aspect ratios, and sound levels.

The task felt impossible to achieve — short deadline, huge volume, lots of manual labour. When I was younger, people would often call me lazy, and I believed them for a long time. This time around, I knew this would require a couple of long days — with lots of overtime — and a room for error as big as the Pacific.

Instead of panicking, I went to build my tiny video script that would stitch the intro/outro to each video, standardize the format, and adjust the sound levels so every video ran smoothly, with zero manual fixing involved. Well, one video had sound break up, but that ended up being an issue with the initial recording.

At that time, I was already a part of the Lion Heart Ultra Cross Triathlon team with my sister as Cosmonavt Studio. We’d built the brand from the ground up, where I set a few design systems related to the brand and the clothing line, but that’s a story for another day. By the end of 2023, I came up with a new idea — incorporating my video automation system and taking it to the next level. I called it AVID internally, and it was meant to build a personalized video for every athlete taking part in the triathlon. This was monumental, but we never shy away from a challenge. 

I designed the structure of the video, reached out to a filming crew that would follow a strict schedule on race day, drew up a storyboard with a full list of shots, and directed Ivaylo, our coding partner, to rebuild my tiny script from the ground up with several new features. My goal was to incorporate my systems thinking with my motion design expertise, and it turned into a full-blown service. It grew from a single idea into both a fully automated system and a motion system at the same time.

There was never a doubt in my mind that these systems needed to be built. I think being “lazy” was part of the reason, but I felt a need to optimize each and every process, design, visual, and motion video down into a system that could be reproduced, with every level of quality and polish intact. Only today do I realize what the real result was. Every piece of the puzzle got pulled up to a scale I’d never before thought possible, let alone valuable. To me, it felt inevitable.

While I truly was a “product trainer”, a “motion designer”, an “instructor”, revising all of these experiences inevitably made it all click: 

I build systems. 

Systems that are meant to help people do a better job, faster, consistently over months or even years. 

Systems that helped brands and products scale.

Systems that grow and improve over time.

And it finally made sense.