Hello ! My name is Costin. I love designing & doing things better !
I am an avid problem solver, strategic thinker, highly skilled UI / UX / Design professional with over 10 years of experience, extended user-focused work, broad creative portfolio, focused on all the things that make a product work great for all users, keen on usability, responsive design and technologies of the future, oriented on converting business goals into working products.
On the side, fair technical knowledge, able to juggle between concept and hands-on implementation, able to meet deadlines and to constantly come through with quality results. Ability to improvise, troubleshoot, and innovate.
Thoughtful, proactive, and sociable person who enjoys working in teams and on projects. Some experience in leading a creative team, helping/teaching/coaching the team members.
From the beginning – Flashback to the 2000’s
FLASH was the first love. I cannot say i mastered it, but i delivered great things out of it, and made a live, breathing website. Over the years i have upgraded my skills, animation wise and coding wise. I have delivered, and i continue to, great flash apps and better and better advertising campaigns.
The need
As from the begining of doing this as a professional designer, i understood that i need to deliver complete solutions, not only a photoshop file. So i started learning on how to make FLASH dynamic, get content from other sources, display it and animate it . As soon as i understood that FLASH is not the solution for every project, i started looking for tools that could put my creativity into practice and my ideas into a complete product.
I have discovered, doing other things than FLASH, that i can design more aspects of a product. Having the liberty to deliver a ready project, i found out that i can get involved in every little thing and designing it my way. I have discovered that i can design a whole experience for the targeted audience of my projects. And it became a need to get involved and design every transition, every timing, every color and so on , of the project.
The present
Using WordPress opened a whole new world. I have transformed myself into a designer-developer without even knowing until it was too late . And i m not sorry for that. Instead, now i know how to better design things that will become a web product, i know all the needs that a front-end developer has and all the requirements that a live product has.I have learned the basics and the advanced workings of HTML, a lot of CSS techniques and optimisation tricks, the basics of javaScript and jQuery. With all of that i have learned how to optimise the products i deliver, how to make better every little thing i design. Above that, WordPress thought me more than the basics of search engines optimisations ( SEO ) that can be done, as a first step into the monetisation of a web product.
The take
All in all, moving from a designer to a designer/thinkerer, made me a better professional. But the need to design the web is still the main drive and i remain, at the core, a genuine ui/ux/web designer.