Nobody Plans to Become This

Germán Olava once said that nobody can identify the exact moment they became interested in design—that it was a very long path that might have begun, maybe, with comics. That the internet was the tool that made it real. I’ve returned to that thought more than once. It’s an honest description of something that tends to resist honest description.

Most of the people I grew up with wanted to be firefighters or police officers. By their mid-twenties they’d become lawyers, maths teachers, accountants—respectable, planned lives. I don’t remember deciding differently. I remember drawing obsessively in textbook margins. I remember staying up late on early design forums, saving images, learning to name what I was responding to without fully understanding why. The interest wasn’t a decision. It was an accumulation—comics first, then the web, then everything at once, until one day it was simply the language I thought in.

The internet was the accelerant. Not one site or one moment, but a slow gathering of references and images and ideas that eventually became fluent. You don’t know when it happens. And then you look around and realize it already has.