Self-taught by ear.
Still playing.

It started with posters nobody asked for.

I didn't plan to become a designer. My background is computer science. I studied development, and every job I had in Greece was in IT support.

Design crept in sideways. Like most of us back then, I got my hands on a not-quite-legal copy of Photoshop and used it for the noblest of purposes: putting my friends' faces on strangers and making terrible memes.

Around the same time I was DJing in bars and clubs, and most event posters were, honestly, not great. So I started asking if I could make them myself. I just wanted them to look good. Then every DJ and producer needed a website, so web design followed.

For years I was the IT guy who also helped "with the graphics." My first real job as a designer came at MED-EL. By then, the developer and the designer had already started working together.

I learned the design piano by ear.

I never studied design. Some people learn piano at a conservatory; I taught myself by ear. That turned out to be an advantage. I wasn't boxed in by rules I didn't know existed.

When I got stuck, I looked at how other people had solved the same problem, on websites, on platforms, later on social media. The standards kept moving: image sizes, file formats, the arrival of SVG and vector-first design. Keeping up was a constant education, and I've never stopped.

Each company added a layer. MED-EL introduced me to professional design and grew it into product design. eyeo gave me freedom: room to choose projects and own design decisions. Schoox tied it all together. In one year I went deep into Figma and design systems: atomic design, tokens, components, the whole architecture, learned alongside a design system owner (the Cliff) who held the bar very high.

When I joined Schoox, I told them openly that my Figma knowledge was only surface-level. They trusted me anyway. I'm grateful for that, and I made sure it paid off.

Boring? Only if you've never played.

For years my workflow involved a lot of copy and paste. I'd need a solution I'd already designed, go digging through old files, and rebuild it. Design systems are the grown-up answer to that habit: build it once, build it right, then let it grow.

What I love about them is the attention to detail, and the way that care pays off over time. Maintaining a system can be tedious, I won't pretend otherwise. But done properly and with respect for the people who use it, it gives back far more than it takes.

My computer science background matters most here. At MED-EL, the website ran on a custom CMS built from HTML blocks, so I regularly used HTML, CSS and JavaScript to ship my own designs. Today the line between design and code keeps getting thinner. With AI tools, designers can deliver closer to production than ever. For someone who started on the developer side, that feels less like a trend and more like coming home.

Like any professional, I keep an eye on where the industry is going. Not every trend is right and not every critic is wrong, so I take what works and make it part of my own approach.

One hand on the keys. Both on the business.

I don't really consider myself a musician. I play a MIDI keyboard with one hand, and I couldn't remember more than five or six notes in a row if my life depended on it. But music gave me what I was looking for: one more creative outlet.

I've been around music since my teens. I learned to DJ on vinyl at 16 and made my first productions in my early twenties. What hooked me most was never the performance. It was the machinery behind it: distribution, royalties, copyright, sync, publishing, every kind of rights you can imagine. And the people. Lo-fi and chill beats producers don't tend to meet outside the internet, so Pueblo Vista taught me to build real connections from behind a keyboard.

About a year into the label, I set myself a goal: make this work. Ten years, 3,000+ releases and 700M+ streams later, I'm content with what we built.

When life changed, something had to give, and it was music. It moved from side project to the far edge of one. That's also why pvmm. now has its own home: not a comeback, but an archive that keeps all those releases and connections discoverable. If the label taught me anything, it's to value knowledge, and to share it.

→ The full story lives on the pvmm. About page.

Music and design start from the same place: a creative first layer. What comes after depends on your approach, on which notes you choose to play. Musicians develop a sound over time, and designers develop a way of working. Neither has a single right answer.

That doesn't mean everything is good. There's bad music and there's bad design. But complexity isn't failure. Jazz isn't for everyone, and that doesn't make it bad music; it has its audience. Design works the same way.

We also live in an age without much parthenogenesis: very little is born from nothing anymore. Today's music borrows from records made fifty or seventy years ago, and right now half the world seems to be reliving the 70s, 80s and 90s. Design moves in the same cycles. There was a time when everything online was flashy (pun intended, rest in peace, Flash) and busy. Then the dust settled. Today, from Apple's guidelines to Material Design, the Bauhaus-rooted ideas are everywhere again: clean, neat, and bold when it needs to be.

Music went through the same thing. Genres exploded, then people started choosing. Making bold decisions, pun intended again.

Grounded, mostly. Creative, always.

I'd call myself a pretty boring person. Grounded is probably the kinder word. But I'm rarely not making something.

Leaving Greece around 2010 changed a lot. I'd already studied in the UK and paid my way through it with jobs from McDonald's to DJing events. Moving to Switzerland and then Austria was different: work, rent, a life to build on my own. That's where I really grew as a person.

I already spoke German and English when I left, with Greek as my first language. Years in a German-speaking family and in Innsbruck did the rest. Today my German sounds unmistakably Austrian, probably more native than my English, which has an American accent that a native speaker will still catch.

Innsbruck also made me an outdoors person. Every season has something to offer: hiking, climbing and summer toboggan runs, then skiing, snowboarding and sledding. Somewhere along the way I picked up the idea that after 35 your body gets harder to change, so I took training seriously: weights, runs, hikes. It paid off in the most unexpected way when I became a dad. A newborn weighs five kilos. A seven-year-old who jumps on you for a hug, or falls asleep in the car and has to be carried to bed, does not.

And for the record: I'm a very tall, very big man. Playing American football at the University of Sunderland, my teammates called me The Machine, because I just kept hitting people, hard, all game. Elsewhere I've been Tzatziki, Mykonos and Santorini, which says more about people's knowledge of Greece than about me.

The size can look intimidating. The truth is quieter: I'm an introvert, shy even. The kind who can socialize easily, so people are usually surprised when I tell them. I can't exactly hide in a room. But in meetings I'm calm, clear and structured, and I'd rather make a well-reasoned argument than the loudest one.