What matters to me here is building the kind of space I wish I had earlier. Ticino still lacks a real design community, a place where people can meet, share work, and talk openly about what they are figuring out. So this became my way of helping create that. Less about organising things, more about giving people a real place to connect and grow.

The work here rarely stays in one lane for long, and that is part of what makes it interesting. I wear multiple hats across UX, interaction, visual design, and all the smaller details that help a product feel clear and coherent. It taught me a lot about adapting quickly and being useful where the work actually needs help, not just making nice screens when there’s time.

What started as a group of friends getting tired of how flat the local scene felt slowly turned into something much bigger. I help keep the design side connected across product, website, brand, and communication, so the idea feels consistent wherever people meet it. More than anything, it’s been the place that taught me how messy, demanding, and exciting it is to build something for real with other people.

Those two summers were the first time design stopped feeling like school and started feeling like a real working environment. One stage was built around concept redesigns for Group Corriere del Ticino, the other around an app idea for discovering events and places in Ticino, so even in a short time the problems were very different. What stayed with me was seeing how design has to hold up not only on screen, but also inside a team, with developers and other people helping move the work forward.

A week was enough to realise how much work sits behind pieces that look simple from the outside. Most of the time went into observing how a small graphic design studio actually runs: real briefs, print visits, software, process, and the craft behind the final output. It opened the door to this world for me, and probably also made it clear quite early that pure graphic design was not where I wanted to stay.