My story

The three passions

My name is Nikita Tselovalnikov, I was born in St. Petersburg Russia, and I am a designer, web developer, and electronic musician. My artistic adventures began in early childhood, when I was drawing packaging labels for variety of home-made jams, pickles and baked goods. This passion for applied art has brought me to study in one of the most prestigious Art College in the United States – California College of the Arts, where I had received Bachelor Degree in Graphic Design. Right after the graduation, I was hired by MetaDesign – the renowned international design firm with clients such us Nike, Sony, Audi, and many others. In the middle of dot-com boom, I had joined the start-up game in a B2B company called Outcome where I had assumed a Senior Designer position. Having to wear many hats in Outcome, I had started a parallel career in web development, which, as I realized later, had strongly complimented my design skills. At that time, I began freelancing for different clients: as small as a start-up Venture Fund and as big as Sun/Netscape Alliance. Many things changed in 2002, when I began producing psychedelic trance electronic music as Penta. Balancing design and development freelance business with newly found music interest, I have travelled the world with my electronic music project, and ended up playing in more than 40 countries. In 2010, family affairs had urged me to settle down, and I got a full-time web development job at Check Point Software, an international computer security firm. At Check Point I handled a variety of web tasks for the ZoneAlarm product and participated in branding projects. My family and I have moved to Portugal in 2012, when I got a lead web developer and UX/UI designer position at a small start-up called AllSides. Finally, in the summer of 2013, needing to put all my services under one roof, I had created 9rox, a web development and graphic design company with the potential of outgrowing a one-man operation in the future.