A Design Career That Began With Zero Web Experience — Looking Back on Four Years at mount

Hello — I’m Yamasaki, now in my fifth year as a designer.
It felt like a good opportunity, so this time I wanted to look back on the four years I’ve spent at mount.

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After graduating high school, I spent three years studying graphic design at a design vocational school, then joined mount as a new graduate.
I started out with absolutely no experience in web production.

Right after joining, I was put on all kinds of projects, both large and small — but between having no web experience and being fresh out of school with barely any sense of the working world, I genuinely didn’t know which way was up.

Alongside actual projects, I spent a full year on internal assignments — tracing existing sites, building a fictional portfolio site, writing reports analyzing other websites — and gradually got used to both the reality of web production and mount’s way of making things. (Juggling it all was rough...)

Since mount is fully in-office, I was commuting from my hometown of Odawara to Omotesando (near our old office) at the time — about four hours round trip. Sleep felt more precious than food, and I was almost 10 kg lighter than I am now. Even so, everything I encountered felt new and bright, and every day was spent just barely keeping up with what was in front of me.

By this point I’d finished moving to Tokyo and was slowly settling into life at mount. I mostly joined large-scale projects, working with my hands under an AD.

One project that really stands out is the site forAYANA BALI, the resort hotel in Bali. I helped with wireframes, worked on shooting and photo assets during our trip to Bali, and helped with design. I’ll never forget AD Yonemichi’s back as he kept pushing toward the goal he’d declared in front of so many partners — “we’re going to make the best site in the world.”

Through all of it, I spent my days desperately trying to keep pace with the AD’s speed. My designs rarely got approved, and both my second and third years were a real struggle.

Having mostly just worked with my hands until then, I gradually began taking part earlier in the process, before design even started — on special sites like the one for「PLST’s Warm Reserve Pants」,and「Daimaru Matsuzakaya’s Hyakuyozu」special site, among others.

Even so, when I was told to try planning something, I had no idea where to start, and it was constant trial and error. During internal reviews, AD Hayashi would often tell me, ‘There’s no point making something that already exists in the world’ — but I kept thinking, how am I supposed to concretely imagine and produce something that doesn’t exist in the world?! I felt lost the whole time.

Of my four years, this was the one with the least downtime between projects.

I kept joining projects from the upstream stages — setting direction, planning — and gradually had more chances to stand up front and present myself. For thePaw inc.project, I was entrusted with everything from the initial hearing through direction-setting, planning, and design.

Another feature of this year was how much non-web work I did. Designing a corporate logo, digital signage, a magazine cover — there were plenty of moments where my background in graphic design came in useful in ways I hadn’t expected, and I was glad for the work.

Working with my hands under an AD, from year one through the first half of year three. Joining projects further upstream and getting chances to speak up in front of people, from the latter half of year three through year four. And now, this year, I’ve entered my fifth year...

Looking back, it’s been four years of always struggling with something. mount is a genuinely rewarding place to be — surrounded by top-tier clients and partners, always facing a new challenge. But that’s exactly why there are moments when the gap between what I can do and what’s asked of me feels endless. Lately I’ve been trying to keep from stalling out, doing what I can, as much as I can, every day.

Putting this together, I was reminded of how much I like that feeling of fulfillment — the sense that, day by day, piling up experience means what I can do keeps growing, even a little at a time. Without forgetting that nagging feeling of “already five years in”…, I want to keep struggling with it, going forward ✊

That’s it for my look back on four years at mount. Thank you for reading all the way to the end!


* This timeline is approximate and may differ slightly from what actually happened at the time.