Profile

I am a 32 years old maker, living in Vilnius, Lithuania. I have been designing and developing digital things for nearly 20 years, having started by building websites in middle school.

I studied arts and design, and hold a BA degree in Graphic Design from Vilnius Academy of Arts. Previously I was Head of Product Design at health and beauty marketplace Treatwell and co-founded an app design and development agency Lemon Labs — later acquired by Treatwell. For more details on my work and experience, see my resume. This page is a more personal story.

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As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to both design and code.

I started by building websites in Macromedia DreamWeaver, using all the power of HTML tables available in the year 2004. CSS was still very fresh, and GIF spacers were the hottest design technology. During that time I also started drawing more, and worked on a very silly comic series about a Rooster. My friend thought that I could learn how to animate the Rooster using Macromedia Flash, and that application unlocked a new world for me.

I loved Flash. It combined a design canvas with simple, gradual scripting. You could create an animation and loop it with one line of code, straigh on the frame itself. It didn’t take long to learn ActionScript, and I began making interactive experiments and simple games. During early high school years I produced a lot of small, interactive experiences. Some were built in Flash, some with PHP, and most were short-lived.

A good playground was my own personal website, and I used to have a Lab section with a bunch of these small demos. Over time people started reaching out to me, and in 2006 I had my first paying clients. I considered myself a freelance web designer and developer, and over the next 5 years I created over a hundred websites. Not all websites were client work, I continued to create many small experiments and share them with the world. The need for Flash was waning as CSS was becoming sufficient for great looking designs. But I also kept making small to medium-sized Flash games, even selling and licensing a couple.

My work as a web designer has won me some small awards, and made people consider my design work outside of web context. I had opportunities to design two magazines (one continues to this day with the same design), help produce and edit multiple movies, even act in a few.

In 2009 I moved to study Multimedia Design and Communication in Aarhus, Denmark. During two study years I continued to work as a freelance web designer, later took my first job as a Flash game developer at X-Team. My work there didn’t last long, because in 2011 I helped co-found Socilyzer with a friend I met in Denmark. For about a year we kept building an organization analysis platform.

In late 2011 I have met the wonderful Lemon Labs team that would grow into the most prominent app design and development agency in Lithuania. Apps were booming, and I joined the team as the lead designer. Over 4 years I have designed over 10 apps for our clients, with many winning multiple awards. These were truly wonderful years: great clients, smart colleagues, and a tremendous amount of freedom to experiment, build internal products, and just have fun with friends and technologies. During these years I have also decided to finish my studies, and completed the BA Graphic Design program in Vilnius Academy of Arts.

Lemon Labs were acquired by a health and beauty marketplace Treatwell in 2015. At Treatwell I was the Head of Product Design, overseeing product designs both for B2C marketplace and B2B salon management software, on all platforms: web, iOS and Android. In 2015 Treatwell was acquired by Recruit Holdings in a $171M deal. I left the company in 2018.

Between June 2018 and December 2021 I had split my time between contracting as product designer for new and interesting companies, and building my own products and experiments. Work as a contractor was quite fun, but distracting from bigger projects I wanted to build. My own projects built during that time fell into two buckets: small and released, and big but never shown broadly or publicly. Working alone and splitting my time wasn’t working well.

Since 2022 I’ve decided to focus less on projects and experiments, and more on establishing companies and building stable, long-running projects with stronger financial backing. I helped establish Cube Security, a crypto real-time firewall, and authored company’s first patent.

I still experiment and love to play with new technologies, in new and unexpected, commonly artistic ways. I have built a hand motion controlled drone, AI that generates an infinite number of sunsets, and many generative art pieces. I enjoy what an endlessly expanding canvas of possiblities is our technological advancement, and I hope this ride doesn’t stop.