My unconventional way of saying Hello!
1 of 300 iTexican stories to be discovered. I am looking forward to meeting you!
Hello, my fellow Improver,
When Curtis said "I love to meet people" at the introductory call we had with him, I thought: "me too", and this is my introduction to you.
This is my wife Betty, my sons Kaiyan (arms extended) and Kaishei, and me during our last family trip to Oaxaca, Mexico.
My name is Martino Liu, I am one of the 3 design leads at iTexico; the others are Oswald Aguilar and Ana Gallo and we work under David Sandoval's leadership. I have just recently been named one of the Improving UX Technical Community leaders. I joined iTexico since 2015 as the most seasoned designer in the team with 15+ years of experience now. I consider myself a man shaped by my own passions and I want to share why is that with you now.
I live in Guadalajara, the most beautiful city in Mexico. I happen to be a Mexican 🇲🇽 with double nationality, I am also from Canada 🇨🇦 where I am planning to move sometime in the not so long future.
I was born in Montreal in 1978. My parents met there when my dad was doing his MBA at McGill University and my mother was studying Art. When I was 3 years old we move to Toronto to spend one more year in Canada before we moved to Mexico where I grew up alongside my 9 brothers and sisters and where I have my friends and family, my first passion.
I discovered design, my second passion, in 1999 after some soul searching while attending college in Canada. Back then I wasn’t sure what career I wanted to pursue, but ever since discovering my true vocation I have never looked back again.
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I studied at John Abbott College in Montreal, Canada from 1998 to 1999.
I graduated from ITESO design school in 2005. I chose that school because it offers a design approach similar to the one of the 1920's Bauhaus Design School in Germany, and that has a lot to do with Conscious Capitalism as far as I know.
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Design School at ITESO in Guadalajara, Mexico. Same university Memo attended.
The product of graduation was a book, which I and my best friend Sergio Alvarez wrote and designed in order to present our thesis in front of a Judge panel and an open auditorium, we graduated with honors as a result. The book is available at Amazon Kindle, only in Spanish though, I am planning to do a second book now in English.
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The following decade went like this: a couple of Graphic Design freelancing phases, several entrepreneurial efforts that ended in failures or learning experiences and a couple of success stories, including my 1 million dollar revenue hobby; a service design traveling business where I had the fortune to take more than 500 students to China on academic missions to learn design, architecture, industrial and civil engineering, marketing, and international business. That business ended after taking several blows such as the 2008 world crisis, the AH1N1 pandemic in 2009, and lastly, the 2012 mexican peso losing ground to the US dollar. By 2013 I had one final academic mission and later I had to shut down the business and figure out what to do next.
While reinventing myself I stumble upon Sir Ken Robinson and Salman Khan in the web, both figures and stories inspired me to dedicate myself to the betterment of education worldwide. Little did I know back then how this inspiration drove me to take the next steps in my career down the road. This is my third passion: Education.
In 2014 I started working as a digital designer with a local startup that had the mission to revolutionize the supply chain industry. They are doing great so far, serving the biggest beer producer in the world: AB InBev. This experience was my ticket to join iTexico in 2015, my entry point to the international tech industry where I kept learning more about design with topics like Lean UX, Agile Development, and Design Sprints.
That is me in the far left, standing.
Soon after I joined iTexico I started mentoring with the world-known design mentor-based platforms at Career Foundry and Designlab in 2016 and I have never stopped mentoring since. Here is when I discovered my third passion: Mentoring.
As of today, I have mentored over 450 design students from all over the world and I have over 1,800 mentoring hours under my belt in areas of UX research, Interaction and UI design, Typography, and Design fundamentals. With over 50 design projects over a wide spectrum of industries in 15 years, I have what it takes to become not only a great design collaborator but also a business and tech comrade.
I am ready to embark on a new journey by joining forces with fellow improvers and make a great impact in the world, perhaps collaborating in design education efforts and mentoring here or there all while making new friends in a very passionate way.
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I am really looking forward to meeting with you and the rest of your team.
Best,
Martino Liu
UX Design Lead
Improver