I Spent a Decade Learning How to Design Things. Now I Want to Learn How to Build Them.

I spent a decade learning how to design things. Now I want to learn how to take those things all the way to something people can actually use. That sounds like a career change. But the more I think about it, the less it feels like one. It feels more like I'm finally connecting pieces of my life that have been sitting apart from each other for years.

It started with an old computer

I grew up in a small city in Indonesia, at a time when having a PC at home wasn't something I took for granted. I had an old computer with a CRT monitor that I received as a gift. For me, that computer was a doorway. The internet felt enormous. You could talk to people you'd never meet in real life. You could publish something and have strangers find it. You could make a website from your bedroom and, somehow, people on the other side of the world could see it. I was fascinated by that. And, as a kid, I was already trying to answer a surprisingly adult question: Can I make money from the internet? This was around the early 2010s, when blogging and personal websites were still a big part of the web. So I experimented. I made all kinds of blogs: casual stuff, comedy, personal writing, software-related content. I even had one particularly questionable experiment that I probably wouldn't put on my portfolio today: a website built purely to generate traffic and advertising revenue. It worked. Not particularly well, but enough. And that tiny amount of money taught me something much bigger: The internet could be a place where I could build something and make a living from it. That became a dream of mine. I wanted to work from home, work on a computer, and somehow make money through the internet. I just didn't know what that would eventually look like.

Before I became a designer, I was already messing with the web

My old PC eventually broke. For a while, I continued exploring the internet from my phone. I used platforms like MyWapBlog, where I could customize the appearance of my blog. That's where I started experimenting with CSS. I would edit code in Notepad on a computer, and sometimes from a QWERTY phone. I wasn't trying to become a developer. I was just curious. I wanted to know how things worked. One of my earliest Blogspot websites is actually still online today. And recently, I discovered something hilarious: buried inside that old website was a tutorial I had written about basic HTML. I was explaining things like how to make scrolling text. More than a decade later, I'm back to learning HTML, CSS, JavaScript and React. I didn't plan that. But looking back, maybe the interest was always there.

Then I found design

Eventually, circumstances led me to vocational high school. I studied Industrial Electronics Engineering. I had actually wanted to study something closer to computers, but at the time I didn't have a PC or laptop, and the school recommended electronics because it offered good employment opportunities for vocational graduates. Then, during my second year, I got an old laptop from a relative. And that laptop had Photoshop. That was my first real encounter with design. Not because I had always dreamed of being a designer. I was simply fascinated by the fact that I could create visual things on a computer. Eventually I discovered Illustrator. And I became obsessed with it. Part of the reason was practical: the old laptop struggled with Photoshop. Illustrator was much lighter. But I also discovered that I really enjoyed making things out of lines, shapes and geometry. I couldn't really draw. I still can't draw particularly well. So I naturally gravitated toward flat and geometric illustrations. I didn't know much about design theory at the time. I just knew that I liked making things that way. That eventually became the visual foundation of my career.

My career started with a $5 order

I kept looking for ways to make money online. Eventually I discovered platforms like Fiverr and 99designs. My skills were far from polished. I tried anyway. After a lot of attempts, something finally happened. In 2016, I received my first Fiverr order: a $5 logo. The client liked it and left me a great review. It was only $5. But to me, it was proof. Someone I'd never met, somewhere else in the world, was willing to pay me for something I had created. So I kept going. Before I even finished vocational school, I was already making money online as a freelance designer, mostly creating flat illustrations, logos and visual assets for websites and apps. And then the small jobs started adding up. Hundreds. Then thousands. Over roughly a decade, I worked across more than 3,000 design projects for founders, startups and businesses around the world. One of my Fiverr accounts alone generated more than $100,000 in revenue. There were also direct clients from Dribbble and LinkedIn, partnerships with designers overseas, and projects that happened outside Fiverr. The numbers sound impressive when written down like that. But most of those projects were small. That's important to me. Because the real value wasn't the size of any individual project. It was the repetition. Brief after brief. Client after client. Constraint after constraint. Deadline after deadline. I learned how to turn someone's vague idea into something visual. I learned how to communicate with clients. I learned how to work within constraints. I learned how to deliver. And eventually, I learned how to make the business work.

Then I went to design school

After vocational school, I worked for a while before deciding to go to university. I joined Mehibi Studio as a remote graphic design intern, producing icon and illustration assets for international distribution. After a few months, I left because I wanted to continue my education. I moved from Salatiga to Jakarta and enrolled at Institut Kesenian Jakarta to study Visual Communication Design. Working freelance while studying wasn't easy. There were periods when I struggled to decide whether I should prioritize university or client work. And eventually, my freelance business hit another problem. Sales started dropping. The flat illustration and logo market that had worked for me was becoming increasingly competitive. And because a large part of my business depended on platforms like Fiverr, I didn't control discovery. The algorithm did. So I did what I had learned to do whenever something stopped working: I researched. I studied the market. I looked at what people were buying. I experimented. And eventually I found another niche: icon design.

I became an icon designer

I went deep into iconography. Grids. Consistency. Styles. Sizes. Production systems. Usage. I experimented with different approaches until I found something that worked. And it did. Icon design became a major part of my career for years. Eventually, I worked on thousands of icons and visual assets across digital products, websites, apps and other products. One project alone involved more than 2,500 icons and visual assets for a digital health product. Another involved building an icon system for a Figma UI kit and design system. At some point, I wasn't just producing icons anymore. I was thinking about systems. How should the icons relate to each other? How should they scale? How should different designers produce them consistently? How do you maintain quality when there are hundreds or thousands of assets? Those questions were quietly moving me beyond simply drawing things. I just didn't have the vocabulary for it yet.

Freelancing became a small business

Conania started as essentially me. Eventually, it became something larger. I worked with direct clients. I partnered with designers overseas. I hired freelancers to help with production. At one point, I had someone working with me full-time. Over the last few years, my role gradually shifted. I spent less time producing every asset myself and more time dealing with clients, understanding briefs, directing creative work, coordinating designers and managing production. I was still a visual designer. But I was also becoming something closer to a design lead. That experience taught me another side of design that university couldn't teach me: design doesn't exist in isolation. There is a client. There is a business. There are deadlines. There are budgets. There are production constraints. There are people involved. And eventually, there is someone who has to use the thing you made.

I also got to work outside the freelance bubble

Freelancing wasn't the only thing I did. I worked as a social media designer with Sinidikara on Mayora's social media ecosystem. The work involved research, content experimentation and visual development across major brands including Kopiko, Beng-Beng and Le Minerale. The team helped grow Mayora's community from around 40K to 100K followers. I also worked on an environmental graphic campaign for Bank Mandiri, designing spatial graphics and workplace branding for Plaza Mandiri. And during university, I was selected as one of 80 national student curators for a creative competition organized by the Ministry of State Secretariat, Ministry of Home Affairs and Bekraf. These experiences were very different from drawing icons. But they all added something to how I think about design.

Then the market changed again

By 2025–2026, I started feeling that something had fundamentally changed. Fiverr wasn't what it used to be. The icon design market was slowing down. Competition was increasing. The broader freelance market was becoming harder. And AI was getting very good at producing exactly the kind of visual assets I had spent years making. Illustrations. Icons. Graphics. Visual variations. AI wasn't the only reason I wanted to change direction. There were economic conditions, competition, platform dependency and changes in the market. But AI made the direction of the industry harder to ignore. I started asking myself: Do I really want to spend the next ten years producing visual assets faster? My answer was no. Not because I stopped liking visual design. I still do. But I started wanting something else. I wanted to build things. I wanted to work closer to the product. And I wanted to work somewhere where I could contribute to something that people actually use. That's when I started thinking seriously about moving from freelancing toward working with a product team.

I started looking for what came next

Around April 2026, I started exploring. A lot. I looked at different business ideas. I learned baking. I tried some blue-collar work. I explored things that had almost nothing to do with design. I was basically trying to figure out: What am I actually good at? And more importantly: What do I actually want to spend the next part of my life doing? Then I found UX design. Then Product Design. Then Design Engineering. And something clicked. Not because I saw the term "Design Engineering" and immediately decided that was my new job title. It was the combination that resonated with me. Design. Systems. Interaction. Code. Products. Problem solving. It felt much closer to the kind of work I wanted to do.

Maybe the path makes more sense now

The more I learn about Product Design and UX, the more I realize that my career wasn't entirely disconnected from it. I had spent years translating client problems into visual solutions. I had worked with constraints. I had built visual systems. I had researched markets when my freelance business started declining. I had experimented with different solutions. I had learned to think about consistency and scalability. I had worked with other people to ship things. I simply came at those problems from the visual side. Now I want to expand that. I want to understand the user side. The product side. The interaction side. And eventually, the implementation side. For me, the path looks something like: Visual Design → UX → Product Design → Design Engineering. I'm somewhere in the middle of that journey. And I'm still learning.

Then I found my way back to code

There was another reason Design Engineering felt strangely familiar. Code. Remember the kid editing HTML and CSS on an old computer? That's me. I had also studied C++ during vocational school. I just never pursued programming as a career. Instead, I ended up becoming a designer. Now I'm learning code again. HTML. CSS. JavaScript. React. And this time, I'm approaching code from a completely different starting point. I'm not trying to become a software engineer. I'm interested in what happens when design becomes part of the implementation process. Instead of designing a static interface and handing it over to someone else, what happens if I can take more ownership of the thing itself? What happens when I can design an interaction, build it, test it in the browser, see where it breaks, refine it, and ship it? That's the part I'm excited about.

So I built a Windows 95 portfolio

My first serious experiment in this direction is the website you're currently looking at. I could have built a conventional designer portfolio. A hero section. Some beautiful project thumbnails. A case study grid. A contact button. Instead, I built a Windows 95-inspired interactive desktop. Why? Because I wanted my portfolio to do more than show my work. I wanted it to demonstrate what I'm learning. The portfolio itself became a project. It has an information architecture. An interaction model. A component system. Visual rules. Technical constraints. And actual code behind it. I'm designing and building it at the same time. I'm using code as part of the design process rather than treating it as something that happens after the design is finished. I'm also using AI-assisted development, but I'm deliberately trying to understand what's happening underneath rather than simply generating a website and calling it done. I want to learn the tools. Not just use the output.

I'm not starting over

This is probably the most important thing I've realized during this transition. I'm not throwing away ten years of visual design experience. I'm trying to build on it. The visual designer in me understands composition, hierarchy, visual systems and consistency. The freelancer in me understands clients, constraints, business and shipping. The person who ran Conania understands coordination and production. The kid who built Blogspot websites still wants to understand how computers work. And the person learning UX and Product Design is now trying to connect all of those pieces. That's why Design Engineering feels interesting to me. It isn't a rejection of design. It's an extension of it.

So, what happens next?

I don't know exactly. I'm currently taking a break from client work and using this time to learn, build and explore. I'm learning UX and Product Design. I'm learning front-end development. I'm experimenting with design in code. I'm building projects. And I'm looking for an opportunity to join a team where I can continue learning while contributing what I already know. I'm not going to pretend that I suddenly became a Design Engineer after taking a few courses and building one portfolio. I'm not there yet. I'm at the beginning of this particular chapter. But after ten years of learning how to design things, I finally know what I want to learn next. I want to learn how to take those things all the way to something people can actually use. Design. Build. Ship. And maybe this isn't really a career change after all. Maybe I'm just coming back to the computer.