Cyril Philip Varghese

01

Early childhood

Films and cartoons shaped what I paid attention to early on, and drawing came with them. Most of my time went on learning to draw and making up stories worth drawing.

02

Learning the ropes

My first jobs were in large organisations and on the founding teams of early-stage startups, building interfaces for mobile and web. Design became the part I wanted to understand properly — its principles, and what they did to the software I was already writing.

03

The sabbatical

A year off work to study storytelling, animation and figure drawing, with philosophy alongside it.

Learning to draw properly changed how I look at everything since — and I learned it from some remarkable people.

04

Discovering VR and AR

The first headset I tried made the case on its own, so I learned to build VR and AR applications. Directing a story someone stands inside meant working out what a camera angle does to what a viewer feels — which turned out to be most of the craft.

05

Transition to product design

Designing in VR led me to product design, which is the one place the analytical half and the storytelling half are both the job. Five years in, that has not worn off.

06

Going solo

After leading UX teams on client projects, I went independent as a consultant designer — Verizon, Azentio, Razorpay, MSIG and 1Finance.

The lasting lesson was about consensus: how an outside partner gets a room to a decision it will still hold to next week.

07

CaseChat

CaseChat began with a childhood friend who became a doctor. We both come from education, and we wanted medical learning to be something students do rather than something they read.

It is an AI case-based learning platform: students practise clinical reasoning against simulated patients, and get told where the reasoning went wrong.

08

Yuvabe

Now I lead UX, product and front-end engineering on CreativeOS, Yuvabe's AI content generation platform: the whole production run for a reel — script, references, images, video — on one canvas instead of across five tools.