There are these expressions in English like "the shoemaker's children go barefoot" or "the baker's wife goes hungry," and maybe other similar ones.
The equivalent in Romanian is a bit different — it implies that the shoemaker himself is barefoot.
Both variants, English and Romanian, imply neglect, but the fine difference is that the Romanian one implies neglecting yourself, not others. So I like to think the Romanian one also has a flavour of altruism.
Now, I've found myself using this aphorism many times when asked about my portfolio, and I thought it was a perfect name for it.
So I hope you'll understand the perhaps simplistic and at times clumsy way I've put this content together, in between other, more important shoes — of all types and colours.
I'm Marius, currently UX design lead at Raiffeisen Bank Romania.
Information technology in high school, information technology at university college, information technology again at university; one diploma in vector graphics and another in designing and implementing user interfaces; also studying painting along the way — these are the essentials of my education.
Started with multimedia, publishing and DTP, went on with advertising for small agencies, and caught the early dawn of digital advertising while freelancing for agencies like BBDO, Lowe, Tempo and others.
Digital went hand in hand with UI and UX, and pretty soon I went full-time in the software industry — first in UI roles, then in UI/UX, and lately mostly in UX. I never liked to call myself a "product designer," even though I did design some products almost end to end, and I still do. But my take on this is that when working on big projects in big companies, no one is entitled to call themselves "the product designer."
Even though lately I've mostly used design systems, I like to get my hands dirty with some UI from time to time.
Building with strong standards in mind; I like to justify every little decision when choosing my solutions.
I think interaction design is my strong suit. I also do quite well with information architecture.
Research-wise, I did a lot of user interviews, for generative research as well as for evaluative research. It remains my favourite research method to date. I also set up some quantitative prototype tests, did a couple of card sorts and a couple of A/B tests.
Pretty prolific in prototyping even before vibe coding existed — I had no trouble building anything I needed for testing.
Two kids, playing guitar once in an eternity, passionate about games (not necessarily video games but board games, card games, party games, all kinds of games), interior design, furnishing and home improvement, especially all sorts of electrical work, also bought a 3D printer.