I'm Ray.
I'm a designer.
I live to enjoy what I do.

Ray is a designer from Japan who believes solidifying concepts is the essential key to what he does. And at the same time, he believes this solidification process to be the most challenging task in the entire design workflow. To Ray, graphic and web skills are, although very strong, merely tools. His job is to put together the concept and the skills to create a design piece valuable to not only the client, but more importantly, to the end users.

Ray currently works as a designer at Advisor Websites, a digital marketing firm based in Vancouver, BC that specializes in providing personalized websites and branding packages for financial advisors. There, he works together with client onboarding coordinators to build websites for their clients in the financial industry, based off of their in-house website building platform, while utilizing front-end web development skills to add more personalized design elements and extra custom functionalities. In addition, Ray enjoys designing logos and developing branding packages for those clients who are new to the financial industry or considering redeveloping their brand.

Aside from his full-time job, Ray has also been active as a freelance designer, working on different kinds of projects for organizations and individual business owners. As a freelancer, he has gained more experience not only in the visual design and web area, but also in other creative fields such as videography and photography. The time he spends on these projects have given him new perspectives and inspirations toward his creative thinking processes. And most of all, he absolutely enjoys doing them!

Spending most of his youth in Ontario, Canada, he became a bilingual in English and Japanese, and also a multicultural individual at the same time. He chose to live in Japan, his home country, during a 4-year university program at Keio University, and then made his first step to becoming a designer at an advertising agency in Tokyo. He stayed there for a year and a couple of months before moving to Canada once again.

Shortly after his arrival in Canada for the second time, Ray got enrolled into the New Media Design and Web Development program (a 1-year certificate program back then) at British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT) in British Columbia. There, he was able to build up more advanced skill sets on top of the fundamentals that he had already had. More importantly, he also gained lots of industry connections at BCIT, some of which actually led to a work opportunity afterwards.

After completing his study at BCIT, Ray has worked at Massive Media Inc., a digital agency in Vancouver, and COS Educational Consulting Inc., a Japanese educational consulting firm in Vancouver, before starting his new challenge with his team now at Advisor Websites.

Besides being a designer, Ray is also a front-end web developer, photographer, film creator, writer, traveller, rock music enthusiast, football (soccer) lover, and a snowboarder.

This website is designed and hand-coded by Ray to showcase his skills as a designer and as a web developer.