I moved to Los Angeles in March, and for the first week I kept waiting for something to change about my work. The apartment was new. The light was different, that particular Southern California brightness that hits everything flat and warm. The streets were wide in a way that felt slightly absurd after Istanbul's narrow chaos. My partner and I were still unpacking boxes when I opened Figma for the first time and found, unsurprisingly, the same dashboard screens I'd been redesigning for three weeks. Same components. Same edge cases I'd been putting off. Same Slack message from our frontend engineer asking about a spacing inconsistency I'd documented but not yet resolved. Location independence is real. The fantasy version of it is not. What I actually expected I've been moving between countries since 2019. Saint Petersburg, then Thailand and Bali, back to Russia during the COVID lockdowns, then Turkey for most of 2020 and 2021, Istanbul for the first part of this year. I used to think, and I think many remote workers believe this quietly, even if they don't say it, that a new environment would somehow generate new energy. That the change of scenery would shake something loose creatively. That I would sit at a cafe in Chiang Mai and suddenly understand the design problem I'd been stuck on. This is not completely wrong. Sometimes a change of environment does shake something loose. But it's much more mechanical than the romantic version. Unfamiliar surroundings force you to pay attention differently, and occasionally that attention bleeds into how you think about a problem. It's temporary. It fades in about three days. What doesn't change: the actual hard parts of the work. The same files followed me everywhere At VALK, I've been designing a platform for institutional private capital markets. The complexity is not the kind that changes based on your mood or your environment. Data-dense tables for investment managers. Deal flow interfaces for asset managers who don't have patience for UI that requires explanation. Compliance reporting screens that have to be precise and readable at the same time. These problems were hard in Istanbul and they're hard in Los Angeles. The specific issue I remember bringing from Turkey to California was a table component problem, handling variable column configurations across different institutional user types without breaking the layout logic. I'd been circling it for weeks. I thought, half-jokingly, that maybe the new timezone would give me fresh eyes. It did not. I solved it eventually, but in the same way I solve most hard design problems: by sitting with it long enough that I stopped being clever about it and started being systematic. That happened in my apartment in Silver Lake, looking at the same Figma file, drinking coffee that honestly wasn't as good as what I had in Istanbul. The location had nothing to do with it. What actually changed (and not for the better, at first) Moving from Istanbul to Los Angeles made my async work more async, which was not the plan. London is where most of the team is. From Istanbul, I was two hours ahead, manageable. I could join early afternoon calls without too much friction, and there was natural overlap in the mornings when engineers would post updates I could respond to before they left for the day. From Los Angeles, I'm eight hours behind. By the time I sit down to work in the morning, the UK team is finishing their day or already gone. This sounds like a small logistical detail but it compounds. A question I ask at 10am my time gets answered when I'm asleep. Their follow-up arrives while I'm still sleeping. A review cycle that used to take a day and a half now takes three days if the back-and-forth goes more than two exchanges. I adapted. We adapted. More documentation, more explicit async communication, more decisions made in writing rather than in calls. In some ways this is better, I'm more deliberate about what I communicate and how. But I'd be lying if I said the timezone gap didn't cost us something in the first few months. There were moments where I missed something obvious because I wasn't in the same rhythm as the team. This is the kind of problem that the "work from anywhere" discourse never really accounts for. Yes, you can work from anywhere. But your teammates are somewhere specific, and the further you drift from their timezone, the more you have to build systems to compensate. What did change, genuinely Living in the US changed how I understand American financial users. VALK serves institutions, mostly European and increasingly American. When I was designing from Russia or Turkey, I had theoretical understanding of how American financial professionals operate. I knew the products they use, the conventions they expect. But there's something about actually being in the country, seeing how people talk about money here, overhearing conversations, noticing what financial apps are being advertised on the subway, what interfaces are common in everyday banking, that adds texture to that understanding. It's not that I couldn't design for this user before. I could. But now I have more reference points that are intuitive rather than researched. The difference between knowing something from documentation and knowing it from living inside it. I also started paying closer attention to American design communities. More meetups here, more conferences, more public discourse about design at companies I actually recognize. I've attended exactly one meetup in five months, because I'm deeply introverted and networking in person still feels exhausting. But I've been reading more, following more people working at American fintech companies, understanding the professional ecosystem better. Even if I never go to another event, the ambient exposure matters. It's like background radiation for your professional thinking. Location changes mood. Mood changes work. But not as much as you think. I want to be precise about this because I think it's easy to overstate. There's a version of this reflection where I say every place I lived made me a better designer. That's not really true. What changed was my mood, my general sense of possibility, my stress levels. These things do affect work, a stressed, unhappy designer produces worse work than a content, settled one. But that's a floor condition, not a creative lever. Thailand was beautiful and I was happy there. I also did some of the worst design work of my time at VALK during that period, because I was distracted and the team was still figuring out what VALK was supposed to be, and I didn't have enough context about the domain to make good decisions. The good mood didn't compensate for the missing knowledge. Istanbul in 2021-2022 was where I did some of my better work. Partly because I was more settled, had been at VALK longer, understood the product and users more deeply. Also partly because Istanbul is a city that makes you feel like a person, good food, good coffee, real neighborhoods. My partner and I were genuinely happy there. That helped. But I was also just more experienced. The city didn't give me the experience. Bali during COVID quarantine was maybe the strangest period. We were stuck, genuinely uncertain about what was happening, and I remember doing extremely thorough, detailed design work just to have something controllable in an uncontrollable situation. That wasn't the location inspiring me. That was anxiety channeling itself productively. The nomad myth and what it costs There's a particular kind of person who is very loud about location-independent work on the internet. They emphasize the freedom, the novelty, the flexibility. They're not wrong that these things exist. But they underweight what constant movement costs. You can't build habits easily when you're moving. The gym you found in month one is not there in month two. The coffee shop with the good wifi and the table by the window, you figured that out, and now you're in a different city and have to figure it out again. Small things individually. Accumulated, they add friction to just getting started each day. More seriously: you can't go deep on work when part of your brain is managing logistics. Finding accommodation, navigating healthcare, figuring out banking, dealing with visas. Even when you're good at this, it's cognitive load that doesn't go to design thinking. I spent time in nine or ten different places over three years. I don't regret it, my partner and I were doing something important together, seeing the world, building a life that felt like ours rather than default. But I was also slower at work during moving periods than during settled ones. I would not recommend constant movement to someone who wants to do their best design work. The best work I've done was in one place for a long time I've been in Los Angeles for five months and I can already feel the difference. I have a desk. The desk is in the same room every morning. I know where to get good coffee within walking distance. My partner and I have routines. These things sound trivial, but they free up the part of my brain that used to manage orientation. The design work I've done this year, more complex component architecture for the VALK platform, working through the data visualization problems for portfolio reporting, thinking through how the product should evolve; has been more sustained than in previous years. I'm not moving fast, necessarily. I'm thinking more carefully. I go back to problems more often. I'm less likely to ship something I know is not quite right just because I need to close the file and go figure out where to eat. Some of this is just that I've been at VALK longer and understand the domain better. But some of it is genuinely the stability. What LA gave me that I didn't expect The city is enormous and car-dependent in a way that's genuinely difficult to adapt to after years of cities where you walk everywhere. I don't love that. But the scale of it, oddly, has been good for my sense of proportion. When everything is big, you stop expecting small decisions to be precious. The design industry discourse I'm now more exposed to operates at different scale, companies with huge user bases, design teams with dozens of people, problems that involve millions of users. I'm still at a company where I'm the only designer. But being adjacent to that scale, reading about it, occasionally talking to people who work in that context, has recalibrated how I think about our own product decisions. Some of our problems are genuinely hard. Some of them are small and I was treating them like they were hard. That's a useful recalibration. If you're a remote designer thinking that moving to a new city will solve your design problems: it won't. The files come with you. The hard conversations come with you. The edge cases in your component library come with you. But if you're exhausted, genuinely exhausted, from moving too much, and you find somewhere that feels like it might be home for a while, settle. Give it a year. See what you can actually do when you're not managing logistics in the background. I'm still figuring out LA. But the Figma work is going better, and I don't think that's a coincidence.

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