Design has been a part of my life many years before it became a career. Explore how everything evolved in the following timeline overview.
My introduction into graphic and web design started while still a kid, in school, around 6th or 7th grade. It started with forum signatures and avatars, and slowly evolved into logo designs, blogs and WordPress based websites.
In high school I discovered the Digital Point forums, where entrepreneurs from all around the world were posting logo design contests for their businesses. That was a turning point for me and what kickstarted my career into logo design.
After finishing high school, I continued freelancing - mostly out of passion for design - while still experimenting with different jobs and directions. I was joining contests on both Digital Point and 99Designs.
By now I had already read dozens of articles about logo design and watched a few online courses. There were still very few resources online back then, affordable for starting designers.
A few years and dozens of projects into freelancing, I landed my first full-time role at Logokompaniet, a Norwegian studio built on a 24-hour-turnaround model. I joined as the second designer and, over nine years, grew into its senior/lead designer - delivering 1,000+ approved logos and brand identities, owning the studio's own rebrand end to end, and introducing realistic product mockups (shot myself) that sped up client approvals and grew order sizes. I also mentored a newly hired designer into the studio's method, who became a top performer at winning new work and later joined my own studio. This was the turning point where passion became craft, and craft became career.
Around the end of 2015, beginning of 2016, I've decided to take an advanced graphic design course to fill in some of the gaps. This is what lead me to learn more about mockups, how they worked and the benefits that they brought to a project.
Discovering the value behind mockups made me create dozens of my own, leading to the start of designalot.net - a website where I would share those resources with other creatives.
In the same year I've made my first typeface - Cabo Rounded - using the "Fontself" extension for Adobe Illustrator.
In a couple of years, Design a Lot's resources where downloaded hundreds of thousands of times and gathered over 20.000 newsletter subscribers. And the website is still active today.
In 2017 I opened my own studio, Brand Creators (Design a Lot SRL), to bring quality logo and brand-identity work to the Romanian market and beyond. It's since grown past 300 brand and design projects for local and international clients. Here the work expanded into creative direction, UX/UI, web design - and into leading: I direct a second designer on execution, draw on a trusted network of specialists for complex builds, and own client relationships and delivery start to finish.
What started as solving a challenge for a client, turned into a SaaS project development. So in 2021 we've started setting the grounds for Thermoforming Tech - a SaaS offering tools for CNC layouts and price calculations.
I was in charge of designing the UX/UI of the platform, building the presentation website and managing the relationship with the team of developers.
After over a year in development, in 2022 I've launched the Brandogram Typeface, a series of fonts meant to be the ultimate tool for monogram designs. The typeface has been launched on Design a Lot, has it's own website built and it's available on major online marketplaces like: MyFonts, Monotype, CreativeMarket, Font Bundles and more.
Fifteen-plus years, thousands of projects and a few typefaces later, I work across brand, type, web and product - increasingly using AI under human art direction to produce brand-consistent work at scale. I run the studio, and I'm open to senior in-house brand roles where I can own a visual identity system end to end.
If you've reached the end of this section, thank you for taking the time to do so! And feel free to reach out if you want your project to be part of this journey...
Let’s start by understanding where your brand is now and where it needs to go.
If you’re looking to clarify, evolve, or scale your brand, this is a good place to start. Whether you already have a clear direction or are still defining it, I work with businesses to translate objectives into coherent, scalable brand design systems.
bogdan@casota.ro
First, help me understand your goals, context, and what you’re trying to achieve by answering a few quick questions. After that, I’ll get back to you as soon as possible to discuss next steps.
