Vernard. Filipino-born American, originally from the Philippines, otherwise known as the country where karaoke is treated less like entertainment and more like a constitutional right.
As a kid, I was always drawn toward arts and design. Drawing things. Taking things apart mentally. Wondering why some things “felt right” visually and others looked like somebody assembled them blindfolded during a power outage.
Then came computers.
As a teenager, before and during college, I started stumbling into web development. I use the word “stumbling” intentionally because my first idea of making a website was literally saving a Microsoft Word document as an HTML page. Peak engineering. Eventually I discovered Microsoft FrontPage and thought I was basically hacking into the Matrix.
U.S.
I landed in the United States in 2003. Went back to school in 2004 for an associate degree in Multimedia after “completing” my bachelor’s degree in Computer Science by about 99%. Yes, it’s incomplete. One percent away from greatness. The educational equivalent of parking perfectly and forgetting to pull the handbrake.
After graduating, I pushed further into design and multimedia while working for Intava in Bellevue, Washington, building retailer support kiosks and multimedia systems. The folks at school helped me land that job, and honestly, that period shaped a lot of what came next. It was one of those moments where design stopped being “something I liked” and started becoming an actual career path.
In 2009, I became a U.S. citizen on the same day Barack Obama stood outdoors in Washington D.C., taking his oath as the 44th President of the United States. Timing-wise, that was admittedly pretty mental.
I’ve worn a ridiculous number of hats professionally. Multimedia Producer. Graphic designer. Web developer. Frontend engineer. UX designer. Product thinker. At Talyst, the people around me realised pretty quickly that locking me into only motion graphics and multimedia work was a waste. One minute I was stitching together video compositions and visual effects; the next, I was building PHP and ASP microsites and diving headfirst into frontend development. ASP wasn’t ASP.NET yet, by the way. Ancient times. Dinosaurs roamed the Earth. Internet Explorer still had human rights.
Fast forward a bit and my career turned into this strange collision between design, engineering, behavioural psychology, accessibility, and systems thinking. I worked with Australians. Europeans. With – ugh, who knows anymore. At some point all the time zones started blending together into one endless Slack notification.
Then life shifted again. I moved back to the Philippines after about a decade in the U.S. Worked there for wages lower than a shift manager’s at a Birmingham, Alabama, McDonald’s. Hated it. So I grabbed my long-term fiancée, who is now my wife, accidentally upgraded us into parenthood because Freja was born, and headed back to the United States to start over properly.
Due to “unfavourable circumstances”, we couldn’t remain in Washington State, so we moved to Las Vegas, Nevada. Oddly enough, I was one of the few people there who didn’t end up working in a casino. Don’t ask me for statistics. I made them up emotionally.
Las Vegas was where everything changed professionally. That was where I properly broke into user experience design. Back then, there was still this widespread misunderstanding that UX was just “making apps look pretty”. No. Not even close. User experience is behavioural psychology plugged directly into software strategy, engineering reality, accessibility, business constraints, and interface design all at the same time.
That’s what fascinated me about it. Every discipline inside a product company usually optimises for one thing. Engineers ship working systems. Executives chase growth. Marketing chases conversion. UX is the strange role sitting in the middle trying to stop the human being from getting crushed by all of them simultaneously. That is not a soft skill. It is one of the hardest coordination problems in modern product development.
And when UX is done properly, nobody notices it. Nobody opens an application and says, “Wow. Incredible information architecture.” They just find what they need and move on with their life. The work disappears into the experience itself. That’s the standard. Invisible clarity. No cognitive wrestling match with a settings menu designed by a sleep-deprived goblin.
My favourite part of user experience design? Visual design.
I know UX is not supposed to be reduced to pretty screens, and I agree with that completely. Research matters. Structure matters. Accessibility matters. The boring invisible decisions matter. Sometimes more than the visible ones.
But if you ask me which part still gives me that little spark, it is the moment an interface starts looking real in Figma. Clean layout. Proper spacing. Sharp hierarchy. The point where an abstract idea stops being a conversation and starts becoming something people can actually see, click through, and react to.
I like that moment when stakeholders see their idea come alive and suddenly understand what they were trying to say all along.
That part is brilliant. The whole UX process matters, of course. But everyone has a favourite setting. Some baseball players prefer batting over pitching. Some guitarists prefer rhythm over lead. I like turning messy product ideas into interfaces that look like they finally got their life together.
Somewhere along that journey, I broke into six figures. Which sounds impressive until you realise the global economy has collectively decided that earning under half a million dollars now means you are apparently one medical emergency away from eating drywall for dinner.
Meanwhile, life outside my profession kept evolving too.
Angelica upgraded from executive assistant to marketing manager. Nadia, our second daughter, arrived in 2021. Eventually our family made the massive move from the Southwest all the way to Massachusetts. End-to-end across the country. We finally settled where we actually wanted to be: excellent education, excellent healthcare, peaceful surroundings, seasons that actually exist, and enough cold weather to make coffee taste better somehow.
And yes, contrary to what everyone says, I genuinely enjoy the weather here. Not sarcasm.
A few random facts about me
I cook. Sometimes by accident, I produce something that feels suspiciously close to a 3-star Michelin dish.
Recently got into baking because I love my wife and because butter apparently has the magical ability to solve emotional problems.
I’m heavily into sim racing. Proper petrolhead stuff. I’m no Ayrton Senna, though. Usually I’m behind the fastest person in the world by about 5 to 8 seconds, which in racing terms is approximately several geological eras.
I took Kendo classes. Also Taekwondo, although Kendo was the one that stuck harder, mentally.
I play guitar. Not professionally. I can’t read music notation properly, so most of my musical development has been powered almost entirely by caveman instinct.
My wife and my two daughters, Freja and Nadia, are the centre of pretty much everything I do.
As for dislikes:
People who hurt animals. Toxic P.I.C.s. People who cannot manage time. People who refuse to consider perspectives outside their own. Excessive religiosity. Closed-mindedness in general, honestly. People who refuse to recognise logical fallacies. Everyone commits them. Fine. We’re human. The problem is when the fallacy could punch them square in the face, and they would still insist the argument is sound. The world is already complicated enough without people proudly volunteering to stay intellectually stationary.
Anyway. That’s me.
You probably came here expecting more UX case studies and frontend engineering talk. Instead, you somehow ended up reading about karaoke, sim racing, baking, and incomplete Computer Science degrees. Life’s weird like that.