Every project teaches something. I have built a few companies and most of them did not work, and I am not ashamed to say it. The lessons came through failure, and I would not have learned them any other way.

Diagonal was the one that worked. The team was made of people I genuinely admire, and I learned more there than any university could have taught me. Learning by doing, by failing and by trying again. This is the project I want to tell you about.

I had spent 14 years as a graphic and fashion designer and I was frustrated. I wanted to build things that moved, so I enrolled in an iOS training program and wrote my first lines of code.

In that classroom I met the person who would become my business partner. He was already a senior developer. I was an experienced designer. We decided to combine what we had and build a company where technology, art and design would live in the same place.

The year was 2013. Smartphones had won, apps were everywhere, and both companies and founders were looking for developers and designers to build their ideas. Thousands of apps shipped every week and startups were being bought by Google, Facebook and Microsoft.

It did not take long to see the opening. With design and development under the same roof we could build our own products and act as a software house at the same time. Diagonal came out of that.

We were driving home when my partner suggested Diagonal. I agreed on the spot. The word works in Portuguese and in English, it is easy to say and easy to remember, and the length is just right for a company built on technology and innovation.

I took the brand. I designed several options, not to pick a favourite, but to study how different shapes and typefaces behaved next to the name. Options are how I find the visual analogies that lead somewhere new.

Building a brand is long, difficult and deeply satisfying. I spend hours researching, sketching on paper and thinking, until I reach a kind of zero gravity state where nothing exists but the problem. Once the brand is settled, the rest of the visual language follows from it.

Two weeks after we opened we got our first client: an iOS and Android application for Zeca Pagodinho, one of the most beloved singers in Brazil.

We ran user research and discovery sessions to decide what the app should do, prototyped it and tested it with real users. Then we hired an Android developer and a backend developer, and built it.

Diagonal ran from 2013 to 2018, with the highs and lows any company has. In January 2018 an acquisition conversation that had been simmering for years finally got serious. A tech giant wanted to absorb the whole team into a new department called Innovation Studio, built around people with an entrepreneurial mindset.

In March 2018 my partner and I started there. A month later the whole team followed. We were back together, with the creative freedom the company gave us.