I was a computer science engineer who lasted three months in her first job.

Not because the work was hard. Because it wasn't the right work. I'd walked into a marketing agency straight out of college, learned more than I expected about how communication actually functions inside organisations, how brands tell stories, how businesses think, and then left, because I could see clearly that what I wanted to make wasn't going to happen there.

So I started SillyStrokes in 2019. With a laptop, a drawing tablet, and genuinely no idea what I was building.

The early work brought together graphic design and illustration, which felt natural and felt mine. But I kept going deeper. I was reading, researching, and trying to understand how visuals could show up meaningfully inside workspaces. Not as decoration. As thinking tools. That search led me to sketchnoting - and the strangest thing happened. I realised I'd already been doing it. I just didn't have a name for it yet.

That recognition sent me somewhere I hadn't planned to go. I started sharing my work online - sketchnote summaries, and visual experiments. The community responded. Projects started arriving. And slowly, project by project, SillyStrokes became a practice.

What nobody tells you about building a creative studio is that the creative part is the easy bit. The rest of it - writing professional emails, walking into boardrooms without looking like you're winging it, putting together quotations and contracts and accounting processes - none of that came with instructions. We figured all of it out in real time, on real projects, with real clients who trusted us while we were still finding our footing. Every lesson came from something that actually happened, which means nothing here is theoretical.

The other thing that shaped everything was a decision we made early and have never walked back from:
relationships before revenue. We're weirdly optimistic about money - we believe it arrives when the work is good and the trust is genuine. So instead of chasing projects, we focus on showing up fully. Committed. Present. Actually invested in what the person across the table is trying to do. We don't want to be a vendor. We want to be the people you call when something important is happening.

That philosophy extended naturally to how we built the team. Fair pay, transparent conversations, no gatekeeping of what we know. The community gave us so much when we were learning - it felt only right to give it back openly. Which is how some of the most important relationships in the studio were built. Not through job postings. Through shared work, shared curiosity, and a lot of honest conversation.

After years of sitting in rooms - conferences, boardrooms, offsites, strategy sessions - drawing while people talked, I started noticing something. The same conversations kept circling. The same energy would rise and then disappear the moment everyone walked out. That observation changed how I think about what visual communication can actually do. Live sketchnoting was where this started. But what I kept chasing was something more - where art, experience, strategy, and craft could come together to make ideas not just visible, but impossible to walk away from. That curiosity is still what drives everything we build.