Hello! It’s Dasha!

I’ve detailed my journey in the design field (including my education) in my CV — it will be attached below.

I still remember this period with gratitude—it was filled with my first orders and successes. I was lucky enough to participate in groza.design until 2018.

At some point, it was decided to take up ceramics. While I was undergoing training in pottery, I met amazing people in this field and true professionals in their craft (for example, Sasha OVO and Ksyusha Polyakova).

And it gets better! I was invited to join the Yandex team as a freelance motion designer, where I worked until 2026.I completed two courses, which helped me improve my skills in graphic design: this is The Bolditalik font course и «Visual Diary» by Pasha Ripley. Both courses became a starting point for new works and discoveries.

Currently, in addition to my main job, I teach a graphic design course at the SCHI art school in Elektrostal (SCHI — School of Creative Industries, a franchise that has just opened in the city) for school‑age children who are just choosing what they want to study. Teaching is a new experience for me, but I’ve long had a desire to share my skills, and the fact that this is happening within the walls of a school where I once studied only makes me happy.

Next, I’ll outline all the areas I’m currently working on, in order of priority.

Graphic design has become the field where I find it interesting to apply my artistic skills and, to some extent, my literary ones.At the same time, I view graphic design more as a craft. I see enormous potential in this field as something that can significantly improve people’s lives, add meaning, and simply bring beauty and functionality to everyday life.[positive]
> I like to structure information.
> I like that the same task can be solved in different ways (graphic design is like a field of hypotheses: it will work / it won’t work)
> I enjoy working in graphic programs. Especially Adobe Illustrator and After Effects: my favorites!
> To identify key meanings and present them in graphics
> In principle, a graphic designer can help address the client’s «pain points» through well‑crafted visuals[negative]
> Impostor syndrome: «not a fashionable designer, not up to date, too original, outdated, mediocre, a hack.» Regular doubts.
> routine. If I find myself in a zone where everything is more or less known, or in tasks where I don’t see the point, I end up in a gray swamp of despondency.
> I don’t have a clear understanding of the path for a graphic designer’s development: art director, and then what? Own studio? I’m not sure…
> Not all the skills that are in demand on the market are things I want to develop for my own reasons — for example, neural networks. What really scares me is the multidisciplinary nature of it all.

I got into motion design gradually: it turned out that my love for animation was reflected in this field. At the very beginning, I didn’t particularly like this program, but then I got into it, and, in fact, this is my main area of work. My level is middle, but I don’t really have any strong desire to move up to a higher level yet. My knowledge is sufficient for what I did at Yandex (for example, vector animation).My best work in this field: videos on historical topics for the Moscow City Education Department. This was an ideal job (in terms of tasks) — to draw illustrations and animate them. Years later, these videos seem incredibly boring to me (and to some extent, they are; I didn’t yet know about the principles of animation and cinema), so I still have the desire to «remake» them a bit with a new understanding.[positive]
> I love animation and I love animating; mostly it’s 2D animation, sometimes using Duik
> fast and effective[negative]
> loss of connection with reality — if I spend a long time in the program, I may start to feel tired of the monotonous action algorithms.
> general fatigue from the program — there’s no desire to develop within it.

My desire was closed about a year and a half ago. For several years after my studies (and we had Tarbeev’s workshop at «Poligraf»!) my relationship with letters was strained, even though I’ve loved drawing letters since childhood. Thanks to «Bolditalik, ” a new stage in my relationship with letters began: I love drawing lettering, modular fonts, or simply outlining shapes by hand. After the course, I started meeting our team’s needs for typographic compositions (huge thanks to Artdir for unlocking my potential in this area).[positivity]
> letters, letters, letters — lots of them, different ones, and it’s great to come up with shapes, create compositions, draw by hand, cut out paper, make them wild and simply bold.
> To keep learning and learning, that’s good! I’d like to take more courses, get more practice — this is the direction I’m interested in developing.[negativity]
> Creating a typeset font is still a big challenge for me — I can do it in theory, but I’m still struggling with the glyphs, and besides, I don’t have such an „iron ass“ that I can spend a long time poring over all those mathematical values and the spacing between characters with love and care. I’m really struggling here. unfinished Italics for your font

I teach an introductory course in graphic design at the ShKI in the HD in the city of Elektrostal. I was invited to take on this position, and I accepted. My students are high school students.This isn’t my first experience in teaching; before that, I taught at an additional education studio (Adobe programs) and ran a mini‑course at «Britanka» on character creation, and I also worked as a teaching assistant at AE_24.I accepted the position because I’ve long had a desire to share my experience with others. I find it interesting to come up with tasks, help with solutions, and reach a common understanding. Although I sometimes lack patience, especially when it comes to studying programs, and I don’t always manage to convey information effectively, I don’t lose my enthusiasm and continue to learn from my mistakes, identifying what worked well and what didn’t.[positivity]
> I explained it myself, and I understood it twice over — it’s great to find some new techniques together with the students during the learning process.
> Communicating with people, getting to know their desires and aspirations.
> Applying my skills, I’m learning to speak in front of an audience and refining my assignments.[Negative]
> I don’t always have enough patience in communication (sometimes I get easily worked up), especially when you have to explain the same material 100 times. Although I understand that everyone has a different level of familiarity with the programs, and I try to take that into account, this experience has taught me the positive aspect of teaching people who already know the programs.

This is what gave me a second wind in graphic design. In principle, I’ve always kept small notebooks with sketches, but I had no intention of turning those sheets into graphic compositions, let alone showing them to anyone. But after the course, it was like a floodgate opened: I discovered that this is one of the most essential tools for a graphic designer, for their reflection and for capturing ideas. And now, for me, a notebook is a safe space where I can reflect on personal experiences and search for graphic ideas. And I really got into working with colour! Acrylic markers are among my favorite tools!Right now, these spreads from my sketchbook are the main part of the content I share on my social media.[positivity]
> capturing findings in graphic images and transforming them into graphic works in programs — I’ve already done this, and I have quite a few creatives for my tasks.
> my personal, pleasant routine.
> awesome content for social media.[negativity]
> is absent.

Currently, I’m studying English twice a week with a teacher: I intend to master the language at a good conversational level and write short notes in English. I’ve always loved English as a language: I like its structure and systematic nature, but I’ve never managed to gather the strength to start studying it intensively.

When I enrolled at Poligraf, I had in mind that I would become an illustrator. But my teachers were A. Vasin and N. Velchinskaya, and they were among the best graphic design teachers at the university, so I decided to stick with this field.In principle, as I worked at various companies, I actually did some illustrator‑related tasks: from isometries (one of my favourite areas of graphics) to pictograms. But I still harbour the intention to design an entire book.[positive]
> I love illustrations, and this love has found its way into all my work, especially when it comes to creating characters.
> I’m mastering new techniques; for example, I recently tried using masks to create noise shadows in Illustrator: combined with the modular principle (I created the illustrations using Stencyl), it turned out great.[negative]
> It seems like I don’t have a specific style that I’d like to be associated with me, although maybe I’m wrong.
> I’m not a «fashionable» illustrator — sometimes I feel like I’m doing some kind of nonsense, similar to a child’s craft project — I don’t have enough distance from it, and it feels like I haven’t really honed my skills in this field yet.