Trade mill Worker to Digital Product Designer - Here is My Journey and Intro

Hola friends , my name is Paresh Khatri a Product Designer, from Surat, India. I was introduced to Steem few days before by @ekitcho and today by writing this introduction so many memories are again coming alive.!

Coming from a lower middle class family from India, for me even owning a drawing book was dream in childhood. But my likelihood towards drawings and art had just started.

I was always very bad in studies , but with drawing the time just flew by. Biggest hit life gave me was when I was forced to drop my education in 12th due to our financial conditions and I was told to search for a job to support family. So thereafter , I started to work in a textile mill on daily wages.

Along with this my passion towards art grew and I started looking for ways to make this as my career.

Till the time I reached 20 years of age I had sold umbrellas, snacks on street and now I was working as a delivery boy and also at the mill for our daily needs. This was the time when my cousin introduced me to the world of designs.

Knowing that my hobby can also be part of my income , I immediately was interested and started learning it. But the question was to have, first a computer and then have internet access to learn online. So I decided to join a IT company as a Office boy who serves you tea, does office work and sometimes get to work on computer too.

Thanks to my guru (mentor) Mr Ashvin Savani (that time was owner of this firm http://www.avinashi.com) who was happy to see a young boy passionate about design. He started allowing me to access PC after office hours where now i could learn UI/UX .

From here my journey began, in morning I would be a office boy and in night a student hungry for learning. I loved to sleep in office just to save time from going home and coming back and wanted to just learn. After 2 years of learning, the boss saw my design work and was very impressed of my work. He took a chance and sent my designs to a client. And yes that got approved. (My first design attached)

The most happiest day of my life and you can say most strange day in office was when a office boy got promoted as Junior Designer. My first salary as a designer was Rs1500 and i was gushing with happiness.

After this I never looked back, learning and working 16-18 hours a day everyday made me better day by day. After working as a designer for few years I started freelancing and was blessed to be part of design community. Slowly getting clients and working on new styles daily finally I managed to earn enough to own small house on loan

My parents being skeptical about how I will payback the loan I was confident on my hard work and new found talent.

Its that day and this day , I am now in this industry since more than 10 years and have worked with companies like Adobe, Groupon, Housing, Salesforce, Kayako, Lux and many more. (Please check of my work below.)

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Explore more at http://www.dribbble.com/kpdesigns.

I love to write, speak and travel making new friends. Design is my passion and this passion made me meet my love of life ( now my wife :) ) Sonika Sharma too, who too owns a IT Firm (who would have thought that a guy like me would go such a good catch) . Couldn’t have wanted more in life . Love, passion, beautiful life, family is all required for a man to be RICH.

Currently I will be working with awesome folks at @busy and @steemconnect to disrupt cryptocurrency so follow us for all future updates :)

So this is all about me.... @kpdesigns on steemit now. Will share more things about me in my blogs, on this amazing platform. Hoping to get your much support.