I didn’t grow up with art in the way most people imagine. I studied instruments. I went to an art school. But art never felt like it was mine. It stayed at a distance. Abstract. Decorative. A kind of background noise.
My world was numbers. Logic. Clean dashboards. I trained myself to bring order to chaos. To transform raw data into patterns people could understand. That kind of clarity was satisfying. But over time, something about it felt incomplete. Like the story was too clean. Too quiet.
As a kid, I loved puzzles. I liked knowing when things fit. When a number balanced. When a rule held. In college, that turned into an obsession with systems - how things could be structured to function, to scale, to deliver insight. I studied business intelligence, built predictive models, and spent hours refining visualizations that could turn noise into signal. I learned how to measure everything, and how to remove everything that couldn’t be measured.
That worked. Until it didn’t.
That changed when I discovered Giao.
I came across Giao through two projects: Menta and Bro. What caught me wasn’t the final design or the surface aesthetic. It was the process behind the work. The layers of decisions. The unfinished edges. The willingness to show what was still becoming. There was a kind of honesty in it. A sense that the work was listening, not just speaking.
For the first time, I saw art not as decoration but as communication. Not as outcome, but as dialogue.
That’s when it clicked. What Giao explored through design was not far from what I do with data. When I build a dashboard or model, it moves through its own arc. Cleaning. Structuring. Visualizing. If I do it well, it doesn’t just present information. It communicates. It resonates.
Before Giao, I saw my work as purely functional. Charts existed to perform. But afterwards, I started to notice how much of my work was emotional. A forecast isn’t useful if it overwhelms. A report isn’t successful if no one trusts it. Every dataset is trying to say something. My job is to help it say it well.
That reframing changed how I worked.
Now, when I design a system or visualization, I ask different questions. Who is going to see this first? Where will their eyes land? Will the rhythm feel intuitive? Can they follow the logic without getting lost? Does it guide them? Does it respect them?
I think about empathy and logic as one task. I think about space, silence, and sequence. I think about what it means to design something that helps people feel less confused, less overwhelmed, more understood.
One of the first times I applied this mindset was in a project for a startup’s finance team. I had already built a reporting tool - projected runway, burn rate, cash flow pacing. It was all accurate. But something about it felt… sharp. Flat. Cold. I reworked the layout. Reduced noise. Reordered insights to follow a more natural progression. I gave the interface space to breathe, and used language that acknowledged ambiguity instead of pretending it wasn’t there.
When I presented it, the feedback wasn’t about the numbers. It was about the feeling.
“It’s easier to trust.”
“It’s less intimidating.”
“This makes me want to keep looking.”
That’s what Giao gave me. A new lens for the work I already do. A way of seeing that includes care.
Giao didn’t make me an artist. It helped me realize I already was one.
I used to think art had nothing to do with my life. But Giao showed me it was always there. Not in galleries. Not in museums. But in the code I write. In the models I build. In the questions I ask. In the way I try to bring meaning into view.
All it took was learning how to see.