I did a thing. Today is my last day as a full-time employee. After working as a principal designer for large corporations, I left my six-figure salary job to start my skincare brand. It's a passion project that started almost two years ago, using my evenings and weekends studying and researching everything I could find about cosmetics formulation and skin chemistry. My journey started with a personal motivation: I wanted to help my mum manage her psoriasis. I explored various options to create products that didn't contain harsh ingredients, fragrances, or preservatives that could worsen her flare-ups. Oh, and it all started in my kitchen: mixing over 50 formulations, performing lab tests, damaging the skin on my face more than once (learning the hard way, literally), looking through thousands of ingredients, and begging manufacturers to let me try their actives free of charge. As I've been self-funding this project from the start, I put all the money towards the formula, leaving nothing else for the website, packaging and social media marketing, so I've had to do all of that by myself. I've recorded a brief video with the help of a friend to tell my story to the world.

I am working on a custom logomark for @moumoujus, which style should I go for?

The UK economy is basically: Work hard. Get paid. Pay rent. Pay bills. Do a food shop. Then spend the next three weeks absolutely broke wondering where the fuck your money went.

The workflows in Opus 4.8 are pretty good. Having them review a bunch of codebases.

I have been a bit quiet on this platform but I’ve been secretly working on a new tech project to scratch my own itch 🫴 Since starting my skincare brand and opening a formulations lab to create everything in-house, we’ve heavily relied on AI to help us find new ingredients, categorise them by function and efficacy and aid us (and our cosmetic chemist) to make the best skincare products. As part of this I created a system of small, independent AI computers that are trained on my data each doing a specific task…

What happens at Series Z?!

I am seriously thinking of leaving the UK. As much as I’ll miss the friends I made over the 22 years I’ve lived there, living life in survival mode is not fun.

Made more progress on my Juliette Sans font, I can use it in Figma but still some issues left with characters pairing and kerning.

I am working on a new branch of @moumoujus exploring colour cosmetics / makeup as it's another sector that's really fascinating. I have the visuals in my head and I am slowly designing them from scratch. I am designing a new font now that matches what I have in mind for the look and feel of the packaging and branding. What can I improve?

More exploration of the Terrastorm project 🥷

What is the most "famous" project you've worked on? Mine has to be the F1 Challenge with @HansZimmer for RedBull Austria. Ended up winning a Best In Show in LA for the RB Hackathon.

Having so much fun branding and creating assets for this stealth startup. 🥷

Me when the client says: no changes required, send me your invoice.

I am back on the Tok platform doing daily vlogs. I am going to use it as a sort of personal diary where I discuss things I learn about running a skincare business. If you’re on TikT, you can find me under the same username.

It’s always fascinating to see the heatmaps of users’ behaviour on your site. Using @posthog for this.

This is the town where I grew up and left 22 years ago to move to the UK. I’m 40 now and I wouldn’t hesitate to move back someday to live the southern European lifestyle.