How did you discover your passion for design and digital work, and how did you learn the necessary skills? I come from an artistic lineage—Dmitri Shostakovich, the legendary composer, was my grandfather’s cousin—so creativity has been the background melody of my life from day one. When I was about fifteen, my parents brought home an old PC. Most kids used theirs only for games, but to me, that beige tower felt like a blank canvas. I installed 3D Studio, which later became known as 3ds Max; experimented with early Adobe tools; and taught myself to sculpt surreal digital worlds after school.

My friends and family kept urging me to show my work to someone and take the craft seriously. At the time, I was actually in my first year of studying medicine. During summer break, I landed an internship at a local design studio, and that experience was my turning point. I realized the screen was where my ideas flowed best, so I traded medical textbooks for pixels and never looked back. Everything else—from typography to UX—grew out of that first spark with a secondhand computer.

What was your career experience working in Ukraine’s design field? Picture the Wild West, but swap the tumbleweeds for Cyrillic type. In the 1990s and early 2000s, design in Ukraine was basically a blank slate. The Soviet era had flattened visual culture: one flavor of ice cream, one model of car and two cola brands—end of story. So, there was no established “Ukrainian design” for us to inherit. My peers and I had to build the discipline from scratch, guided by gut instinct, the occasional imported design annual and a few scanned books passed around on CD-ROMs.

Out of that do-it-yourself environment came some rewarding milestones. The most official was winning a bronze at the Kyiv International Advertising Festival in 2007—a major competition across Eastern Europe. This was the first moment I felt I could call myself a “good designer” with a straight face.

The more colorful achievement was earning the unofficial title of “Salami King.” I designed deli-meat packaging for several Ukrainian producers, and those labels hit such a sweet spot that, to this day, a Google Image search for “salami label design” still puts my work on page one. Friends tease that, despite the Shostakovich bloodline of composers and professors, I might go down in history for elevating cured-meat branding. Honestly, I’m fine with that.

In 2014, you began the process of expatriating Ukraine after Russia invaded and annexed Crimea. What was that experience like? Two events—first devastating, then electrifying—arrived in quick succession and reshaped my direction.

The first was war and the collapsing home market. When Russia invaded Crimea in early 2014, it gutted Ukraine’s economy almost overnight. Marketing budgets evaporated. Agencies shut their doors. Many designers—including me—saw their local client base disappear. I didn’t plan on leaving Ukraine then; I simply decided to cast a wider net and serve clients beyond our borders. That way, my studio and my family would both stay afloat.

The second was the creative spark in the Bay Area. Later in 2014, I made my first trip to San Francisco. The energy there was unlike anything I had experienced: company founders pitching ideas in cafés, meet-ups dissecting UI patterns and murals celebrating experimentation. Design and entrepreneurship seemed woven into daily life. Walking through SOMA and Palo Alto, I could practically see the projects I wanted to build. That visit convinced me that the global market—especially the Bay Area—was the ideal stage for my work, even though relocation wasn’t yet on the table.

With war pushing me to diversify and the Bay Area pulling me toward new possibilities, I pivoted outward: I focused on remote projects for international startups, refined my specialty in presentation design and laid the groundwork for a truly global practice.

How did you establish connections with businesses in the San Francisco Bay Area? My foothold began with one serendipitous coffee. On my second visit to the United States in 2014, I met Maia Bittner, a sharp-eyed entrepreneur refining her startup’s pitch. After I returned to Ukraine, we stayed in touch, and I crafted a deck for her remotely. Maia loved the result, shared it with investors and became my unofficial ambassador. Her introductions snowballed; each startup that raised money with my slides invited the next to call “the guy in Ukraine who makes decks sing.” Over the next several years, I gradually built a steady roster of Bay Area–based clients entirely through word of mouth.

I nurtured that network remotely with late-night Zooms and lightning-fast turnarounds across ten time zones, plus the occasional in-person sprint when stakes were high. As my client list grew—from fintech to robotics to cybersecurity—I realized most key conversations were happening before dawn in Kyiv. After Russia’s full-scale invasion, relocating made sense: it was smarter for my business and safer for my family. Through a few degrees of separation, nearly every project I land today still traces back to that first endorsement I received from Maia.

Tell us about Vova Design, your design firm. What would you consider your personal style or strengths, and who are your typical clients? Vova Design is intentionally small. Our core team is just a handful of designers spread across three countries: I’m in the Bay Area, my cofounder Xavier works from Switzerland, and two longtime Ukrainian colleagues now design from Austria and the United Kingdom. The distance doesn’t slow us down; it lets us keep one foot in the European craft tradition and the other in the speed of Silicon Valley.

Clients describe us as a “Swiss-knife studio,” meaning that if a project touches pixels or paper, we can handle it—pitch decks, UI/UX flows, brand systems, expo booths and even deli-meat packaging. What ties it all together is consistency: clear storytelling, tight deadlines met without excuses and visuals that feel effortless even when the brief is messy.

Most of our work comes from VC-backed startups, cybersecurity and AI companies, as well as the investors who fund them. Our clients bring us in when they need design that can move as fast as their product roadmap—or their next fundraising round—and they know we won’t say that’s outside our scope. That reliability, more than any single aesthetic, is the style of which we are proudest.

What have been some of your favorite projects you’ve worked on at Vova Design? Because UI/UX and presentation decks dominate our daily workload, anything that lets me flex a different muscle quickly becomes a favorite.

For HRT Tennis Academy in Marin County, I led a full rebrand, refreshing its logo and visual system to match its elite-yet-approachable culture. Seeing young athletes wear the new mark on their gear—and hearing that enrollment jumped after the rebrand—reminded me of how design can rally a community and not just close a funding round.

When a nearby independent school needed print collateral for a fundraising campaign, we crafted materials that spoke to both parents’s hearts and donors’ spreadsheets. This proved to us that good design can accelerate social goals just as effectively as business ones.

For the nonprofit Stop Crime SF, I volunteered to create a new logo and website for this grassroots public safety organization. Contributing design hours to a civic cause let me see my skills as a form of advocacy, not just commerce. It underscored how even small studios can leave a public-interest footprint.

Each project pulled me out of my comfort zone and reminded me that design’s real power is in its versatility. One week you’re helping a startup raise Series A, and the next you’re strengthening your own neighborhood.

As a UI/UX designer, what design questions do you often answer in your work? I always keep Bruce Lee’s words in mind: “Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive but adjust to the object. … If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.” Great UX behaves the same way—it adapts to users instead of forcing them to adapt to it. So, my daily questions are simple: Who are these users? What task are they really trying to accomplish? Where does the interface still resist their flow?

For example, on our site for Missouri Star Quilt Company, a quilt shop based in Hamilton, Missouri, that meant thinking like quilting enthusiasts who prize warmth and clarity. We removed every friction point until finding fabric on the website felt as natural as flipping through a pattern book.

UX differs from other design disciplines because it’s governed by empathy and evidence. It is never “finished”—it is a living system that we keep reshaping until it fits the user as seamlessly as water fits its container.

What emerging technologies are you most excited about? I’ve always chased new tools. Starting in the DOS era, my work meant coaxing 3D Studio to run from a command prompt. Every leap since then—Windows, early Adobe and webfonts—has rewired how I work. The two game changers right now are Figma and AI.

Figma provides us with real-time collaboration, component libraries and effortless hand off between designers and clients. This means I can iterate in minutes instead of days. It’s now my default canvas for everything from logos to full product design.

AI has become my creative co-driver. I weave AI into almost every stage: generating image concepts, cleaning up photos, structuring copy and even spit-balling layout options or wireframes on command. Far from replacing designers, it removes the repetitive grunt work and lets me spend more time on strategy, storytelling and the nuances that machines still miss.

Together, these two tools compress the distance between concept and polished outcome, turning “What if… ?” into “Here’s a working draft” in a single afternoon.

Do you have any advice for designers just starting out today? Honestly, I wouldn’t recommend a design career at all! I say that with a laugh—mostly joking—but the grain of truth is this: design will swallow as much time and energy as you’re willing to give it. If you’re not ready for the long haul of late-night tweaks, constant upskilling and endless iterations, choose another path.

If you are ready, commit completely. Keep learning every day—new tools, trends and ways to solve problems—because the industry reinvents itself faster than any syllabus. Above all, worship the details. Clients may not spot every pixel you nudge into place, but they’ll feel the difference in the final experience. That invisible care builds trust, and trust is the currency that turns first jobs into lifelong partnerships—whether you’re freelancing in Kyiv, Lviv or halfway around the world.

In short, embrace the grind, stay curious and let obsessive attention to detail be your signature. ca