Elysium wasn’t my first attempt
Most founder stories begin at the moment things worked. Mine doesn’t, because for a long time nothing did. Elysium Designs is not the first thing I started. It is the first thing that stuck, and everything before it is the reason it did.
A coder who wanted something of his own
I was never a designer by first choice. I was a computer science student in my first year of college, and I wanted to do something that was mine. The one thing I could do was code, so I started building websites as a front-end developer.
I built a lot of them. Hundreds, if I’m honest, and for a long time none of them went anywhere. No users, no clients, no breakthrough. What I did have was a skill that was getting sharper every week: I knew how to take an idea and turn it into something that worked in a browser.
Around that, I did what a first-year student does when they are hungry. I had a mentor on YouTube who shaped how I thought about the craft. I joined hackathons. I contributed to open source. I built web apps nobody asked for. Underneath all of it was one stubborn thought: I needed to build something of my own.
None of it worked. All of it counted.
Building in public
By my second year I was sharing everything: the websites I coded, the interfaces I designed, the half-finished experiments. I wasn’t doing it to look impressive. It was simply the easiest way to keep going, and a way to let the work speak for me when I had no portfolio, no name and no network.
That habit turned out to matter more than any single project. Work you share is work that can be found.
The offer
In my second year, a design agency from the United States reached out to me on X. They were looking for designers, and I was a college student. We got on a call and talked it through, and they gave me a task. It was paid.
I finished it, they liked the work, and they offered me a full-time role as a UI/UX designer. I was still in my second year of college, and it was my first full-time offer.
That offer quietly changed my direction. I moved from code to design.
I don’t see that as leaving engineering behind. Coming from code meant I never designed something without knowing how it would be built. I learned design the way I learned to code: by doing it, sharing it, and doing it again.
What I took from it
- Failed attempts are tuition. Hundreds of websites that went nowhere taught me more than any one that worked.
- Share the work early. Being found beats pitching, and it brings better conversations.
- Being good at the other side of the table makes you better at yours. Knowing how things get built changed how I design them.
That was the start. In part two: what working inside an agency taught me, why I left, and how Elysium began.