Asphyxiation by Oxygen Hands

Piotr Gajos

Kobe and Piotr

That's my younger brother Kobe and me.

Born and bred in a small town in south-western Poland, I grew up exploring abandoned houses, hiding from teachers, listening to Death Metal and pranking whoever I could.

I knew I wanted to become a designer as soon as I launched Adobe Photoshop 3.0, installed from a pirated CD I got from one of my numerous uncles. I started in print and pretty quickly found a dream job — I designed album covers at a small, independent record label that focused on avantgarde artists, mostly from Japan. And in the meantime I stumbled upon the discipline of UI design, started playing with it and fast forward to one sticky, hot night in August 2006, emails and calls woke me up screaming I won the Apple Design Award for this:

iClip Lite 2

Things remained on fast forward from there onwards: I traveled to MacWorld Expo in 2006 and witnessed Steve Jobs introduce the iPhone to the world. In 2007, I was in Thailand designing UX for a mental health product. And in 2013, I moved to San Francisco, which would become my home for a few years.

My best friend tells me my head is as big and round as a lightbulb1, which is pretty accurate geometrically and medically —— doctors suspected hydrocephaly when I was born, my head was so unusually large. Luckily they didn’t find any water, just vacuum. Anyway, my point is my head has been big enough to wear a ridiculous number of hats in my professional career: I’ve been a print and UX designer, game designer, product owner, scrum master, creative director, usability tester, innovation leader, sales engineer, team manager, mentor, brand manager in digital marketing, chief of staff, and a personal therapist to a number of executives. Seriously, whew.

I worked at a bunch of tech startups and one not-so-small company in the US. I worked too much, so after a decade and having earned my dark blue passport, I decided to pack up my stuff, drag the dog onto the plane, and we came back to Europe.

I change hobbies like underwear. You will see me run, mountain bike, hike in the mountains, bite my dog’s toys, take photos, headbang to thrash metal, make pots, read, cultivate my pretentiousness by watching highly pretentious movies and shows that feel like pretentious movies (Slow Horses or The Offer anyone??), write mostly useless shell scripts, cook, travel, study contemporary philosophy and geopolitics…and whatever else I can get my hands on to generate dopamine.

I like to sleep well and get sun in the morning. Oh and holy shit, I’m at the very, very, very deep end of specialty coffee rabbit hole.

Do you want to say hi or do something together? Or send me an empty message with heavy breathing noises? Drop me a line.

  1. Please note I am writing this bio under a heavy influence of Harpo Marx’s biography Harpo Speaks! which I’m currently reading and which makes me think I’m funny. ↩