I started on a Mac in 1990. That's the entire digital era of visual culture compressed into one person's working memory. Every major platform. Every major paradigm shift. Every wave of new tools that was going to change everything — and did, and then got replaced by the next wave.
The tool is never neutral. Every tool shapes what you make and how you think about making it. The question isn't which tool is best. The question is which constraints you want to work inside.
1990: The First Mac
The first Mac I worked on had 8 megabytes of RAM. Photoshop was version 1. The palette was literally limited. You were working in conditions that forced certain decisions by sheer technical constraint. In retrospect, that was an education in clarity that I didn't fully appreciate until the constraints were gone.
Hollywood and the Professional Toolkit
Working in Hollywood across the 1990s and 2000s meant working alongside some of the most technically proficient creative people in the world. I absorbed all of it. What I also absorbed was the trap. The professional toolkit has a professional aesthetic. If you're not deliberate, you end up making the tool's idea of what art looks like rather than your own.
The iPhone as Primary Studio
I work primarily on iPhone — Photoshop Mobile and Photoleap — and have for years. The constraint of the phone screen forces compositional clarity. When everything has to read at that scale, everything has to mean something.
What AI Actually Is in the Toolkit
AI tools are the current version of a question I've been asking since 1990: what does this instrument see that I don't? The tools change. The questions don't.