August 2026 · 3 min read
Gaming made me a designer
How making Minecraft banners at 11 turned into a career I'm still trying to start.
Where it started
I was 11 and playing a lot of Minecraft when my dad installed Photoshop on my PC. I didn't have a plan for it. I just started making things about the thing I loved, which was Minecraft.
They weren't pretty at first. But I got better, and better, and kept going.
Before long I was making "speedart" videos: recording myself designing a YouTube banner for a Minecraft channel, then speeding the whole thing up into a three or four minute video. A typical banner meant rendering the person's Minecraft skin in 3D in Cinema 4D, then building the rest of the design around it in Photoshop. I made a lot of them.
Here's roughly how it went, from the very first ones to some of the last:
The first ones. I was 11.
Some of the last ones, a few years in.
Then people started paying me. At first it was something like 5–10 kroner a banner, which felt like a fortune. As the videos got more views and more requests came in, my prices went up with them. Eventually my channel was one of the top Minecraft design channels, and I was making banners for some of the biggest Danish YouTubers at the time, like Judex Gaming and McKidPro.
Looking back, that was a design job. I just didn't have a word for it yet. There were clients, briefs, feedback and deadlines, and my portfolio was a YouTube channel.
The technical side
Gaming pulled me toward the technical side too. I set up my own Minecraft servers and started writing code for them, mostly because I wanted something to work and nobody else was going to make it for me. That curiosity stuck around. Today I run a small side business with my friend Christian, selling FiveM scripts to GTA roleplay servers, and it's sold to over a thousand customers.
Finding UX
Around 15 or 16, I got curious about other kinds of design. Banners were fun, but I wanted to know how websites and apps were put together, and why some felt good to use and others didn't. So I started learning UX, UI and web design, made websites for small businesses while I was still in school, and got a Dribbble invite that I used to share work as I got better.
Still a junior
Everything I do today started with a kid making Minecraft banners. The habit of making something every day, the eye for small details, learning to take feedback from someone who's paying you: it all traces back to that.
Still, twelve years in, I'm a junior on paper. All that designing isn't the same as a full-time role at a company, and I know that. There's a lot I haven't done yet: working inside a real product team, with its research, processes and trade-offs. That's exactly what I'm looking for now.
But I'm not starting from zero either. I've learned design the same way I learned everything else: by playing with it until it worked.
If you're curious why I think now is a good time for teams to take a chance on someone like me, I wrote about that too.