About me

Born in 1984 in Lisbon, Portugal, I'm a second-generation Designer, following in my father's footsteps (and according to my mom, I'm a pretty good one). At 16, I started freelancing as a Digital Colorist, which led to discovering illustration as one of my passions. In 2008, I graduated in Product Design (Industrial) at Lisbon's Fine Arts School.

I have been working for little over 20 years. For the first decade, I mainly worked as a Graphic Designer and Illustrator, while struggling to make ends meet in a country badly hit by the sub-prime crisis.

Then, in 2012, I joined the Lisbon startup scene with WannaPlayer, a top 15 finalist on The Lisbon Challenge (ranking 12 out of 150 European startups). This is where I transformed into a UX Designer and later evolved into a Digital Product Designer (it's unknown if this is my final form).

Fast forward to 2014, I moved to Stockholm, Sweden, where I have been enjoying the long dark winters, living the lagom life and working for Swedish companies of all sizes, like Goo Technologies, Ericsson, TriOptima, Mentimeter and Klarna.

In my opinion, a designer's job is to bridge user needs with business and development value. Therefore, we should conduct/collaborate with research, visualize ideas with wireframes or mockups, and prototype to enable stakeholder/development alignment and usability testing.

I also love to code (I'm a nerd for HTML, CSS, and JS), which helps in working closely with developers and makes me a great addition to any Design Operations, or Design System team/effort (been part of 6 in the last few years).

Outside work, I mentor the next generation of designers at ADPList and am a hardcore gamer (I was even a video games journalist some years back).

Find me online at

https://www.linkedin.com/in/menosketiago

https://medium.com/@menosketiago

https://www.youtube.com/@menosketiago

https://www.instagram.com/menosketiago

Career highlights

• Helped design a WebGL editor called Goo Create (think Spline but 8y ago). Amazon later acquired it and is now known as AWS Sumerian.
• Led the Ericsson UX 2.0 initiative, which generated new Ericsson design language and principles. This effort culminated on the award-winning Ericsson Design System (IF Design and Red Dot).
• Art directed and designed the Ericsson Security Manager VR experience. A proof-of-concept project, that showed how the Ericsson Design System could also be used in immersive 3D experiences.
• Published How Bad is the Tech Gender Gap in Sweden? on Medium.
• Designed, implemented the frontend code, and documented the TriOptima Design System. At the time, it encompassed 2 Sketch libraries and a tech stack-agnostic CSS/JS framework. It was used in 5 different products, where a single critical bug could result in thousands of dollars in losses.