Built different by design.

It started the way it starts for a lot of designers — with pirated software and YouTube tutorials. Not exactly a humble brag, more of a rite of passage. The point is it worked. Being self-taught teaches you something formal training sometimes doesn't: how to figure things out when there's no one to ask.

Design led to tech. Curiosity about how things actually get built landed me in startups — writing JavaScript, building KPI dashboards, working in environments where speed and systems mattered more than aesthetics. Most designers can't read a data model. Most developers can't build a brand. Ending up fluent in both means your site gets built with the strategy already inside it — not bolted on after the fact.

Then came Cambodia.

A couple of friends had a wild idea to start a full-service marketing agency in Southeast Asia, and the honest answer to 'should I do this?' was: why not. I led branding and design — built identity systems for a real estate development, created the visual language for a café relaunch that customers actually responded to — while my partner ran digital marketing. For the first time I was solving the whole problem: not just how something looked, but how it performed, how it generated leads, how it helped a business grow. That experience changed what I thought design was.

Coming back, the question became obvious: why am I not doing this for myself? YNOT Creative started from that — equal parts 'why not' and Tony backwards, which tells you something about how I think. The name stuck because it captures something true: most good decisions are made by someone willing to just go ahead and do the thing.

What the agency years — both running one and watching them from the client side — taught me is that context is the thing that gets lost. A brief passes from strategist to account manager to designer and somewhere in that chain the original problem gets filtered out. By launch, the work barely resembles what was discussed in the first meeting.

One person means the context never leaves the room. A client told me recently they didn't know what they would have done with their website if they'd tried to figure it out themselves. That's the job — not just building something that looks right, but making sure you're never left wondering what you're supposed to do with it.