About Me (Hilde)

My career started with a brief stint in design and then a wild pivot to wedding photography, where I spent eight years capturing people's most intimate moments. That time taught me more about storytelling, reading a room, and building trust under pressure than any course ever could.

When COVID hit, I closed that chapter (luckily I’d already been actively retreating from the industry before then) and went back to design, launching a branding and illustration studio that let me work with clients around the world on vibrant, playful projects. It was creatively fulfilling, but the solo freelancer life started to wear on me. Turns out, even introverted homebodies need people.

A coffee with a friend led to joining a creative studio, and that's where everything shifted. Being part of a team and working in B2B and B2C marketing, I discovered that strategy and systems lit me up just as much as design. It was a turning point. I signed up for an advanced diploma in digital marketing at Red & Yellow, and for two very hard, very rewarding years, I found the space where my brain actually wanted to live: a place where creativity meets strategy.

From there, I co-founded a marketing agency focused on professional services, fell in love with legal marketing specifically (the bar for creativity in that world is pretty low, pun intended, which means even a small effort makes a huge difference), and eventually set up Sidebar Design to do the work on my own terms. My work via Sidebar has decreased in capacity over the last year due to the fact that I joined Inkblot Design (a creative agency in Stellenbosch) to lead the brand and marketing verticals. My current role is Creative and Marketing Lead at Modern Day Strategy, where I focus on strategy, product design (UX and UI), and all other design work (digital and print).

Along the way, I got very into AI. Not in a way intended to replace my creativity, but in a way that makes my brain work faster and further. I love building automations, coming up with and prototyping apps, and using AI as a thinking partner for strategy, process, and problem-solving. I even competed in a 36-hour AI hackathon in London in 2025, hosted by McKinsey's QuantumBlack, and came out as runner-up on very little sleep and a lot of adrenaline.

My brain spots patterns quickly, connects dots other people might not see, and cares (sometimes aggressively) about how things feel and function. I was diagnosed with AuDHD in my late 20s (and again in my early 30s), so it also means I still have days where I feel like I’m trying to run through a wheat field with legs made of al dente spaghetti. I've learned to design my life and work around that rather than fighting it. So far it’s working.

In practical terms, it means I'm really good at taking a mess of ideas and finding the structure hiding inside it. I notice things, I ask the questions nobody else might ask, and I care about clarity not because I'm fussy but because my brain treats unclear things as potentially meaningless, and then nothing moves.

It also means I think differently, which, for someone whose job is to help various circumstances to be different in meaningful ways, turns out to be less of a bug and more of a feature. I wrote a bit more about this in an essay called ADHD has taught me that traditional trajectories are largely overrated. You can read it on my Substack if you want the semi-unfiltered version.

I also have a cat, Catricia de Lil’, and she is the best thing in the entire world.