Hi there, my name is Rene and currently I am Head of UX UI Design based in Malta working with inovatiq. I gained various skills thanks to my past working experiences as a Designer and Developer based in Malta. Nowadays, I specialise in UX UI design, photo manipulation, logo design, branding and front-end development. I have worked with various well established companies in the I-gaming and Software development sector. Some of the companies I have worked for are:
During my past experiences, I had always approached design through the dual lens of user experience and business impact. I create impactful design and engaging experiences, mainly focusing on growth, user experience, user interaction, UI and graphic design, aesthetics, user research, user analytics, KPIs and A/B Testing. I do love both design and code but in reality they are totally different areas. Through my fun career, I’ve learned 3 things about myself: I love working with people, I love solving problems for people and I love helping people when it comes to knowledge sharing and other things. I always do my best to create impactful design and engaging experiences, provided the best user experience, and easy user interaction, clean and minimal UI and graphic design.
I started off my career as a graphic designer and mainly I was designing banners all day long. Photo Manipulation needs some time because you create a concept / artwork using different stock assets. It is fun and you have to be creative. It allows you to brainstorm and put your creativity to work. Some examples of my photo manipulation designs.
I spent five years studying software engineering at school and strangely enough, my first job was design related. While studying, I was doing some freelance design work and that was the reason why I had a good portfolio to get my first design full time job. That being said, I did not feel right throwing away five years of coding.
I started looking into some basic front-end coding languages. At school I studied software engineering and now web development, so they were different. I started looking into tutorials about HTML and CSS and I found it very interesting.
After some courses on Udemy, I built my first portfolio using basic HTML and CSS but that wasn’t enough. I wanted something more.
I checked what content management systems were popular during that time. I was between WordPress and Drupal. WordPress had more online resourced compared to Drupal so I chose to go with WordPress. I took some courses on udemy and switched my website from basic HTML to a complete WordPress theme. This was fun!
Being Jack of all trades, master of none is ok in some cases. After I was coding in Html, CSS, JQuery, PHP and Ruby (yes I know it’s a backend development language), I wanted to combine design with code. Designing banners and photo manipulation had no relation to coding, so then I put my interest in UX and UI.
UX and UI design gave me the opportunity to combine my coding knowledge with design. I could design a product and code it all by myself. UI design is creative to an extent but I cannot compare it to Photo manipulation. UI design is more related to the user interaction, how the product looks and feels. It is more linked to data. UI design can affect how the user interacts with a product or a website.
For me, UI Design has more value. Do not get me wrong, I still love creating a photo montage every now and then, but UI design give me a more satisfaction feeling.
For e.g. if you have a simple banner when it comes to design (not message) it won’t affect the user as long as the message is clear. On the other hand, if you have bad UX and UI design, it affects the user badly.
You can cope without a top notch banner, but you won’t cope with bad UX and UI design.
If you would like to see some of my work, you can do so by clicking here.
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