Bermudians love to give each other nicknames. When Peter Sousa worked in a local hardware store, a co-worker dubbed him “Pete Moss”.

“He would say, ‘a rolling stone gathers no moss’,” said the 23-year-old.

Mr Sousa didn’t completely understand the logic, but he liked the nickname so much that in January, he called his new creative design brand “Moss”.

And when he’s working on a piece of art, he signs it “Pete Moss”.

“I didn’t want to use my own name on my art,” he said. “I wanted to have an alter ego”.

He fell into creative design while studying computer science in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, a few years ago.

Mr Sousa always imagined himself going into video game design, but also had a passion for art and design and almost anything visually creative.

A stranger on the internet e-mailed him after seeing digital artwork Mr Sousa had posted on his Instagram page.

“They asked me if I could do the logo design,” he said. “I made up a logo, sent it over and got paid. I thought this is pretty good.”

He returned to Bermuda to live last October. A month later, he took a seminar with Sargasso Sea Ltd, a new delivery app business owned by Colin Rego.

“They were looking for agents and designers,” Mr Sousa said.

After the seminar, he approached Mr Rego.

“I was looking at how my brand could collaborate with theirs,” Mr Sousa said. “We have been going from there. I have been designing banners for the Sargasso Sea app and things like that.”

The job with Sargasso Sea, led to another job with one of Sargasso Sea’s clients, FryDays, a restaurant in the Bermudiana Arcade in Hamilton.

“I did a frame animation for them,” Mr Sousa said.

From there, FryDays co-owner Mstira Weeks and Vic Ball, asked him to help with wall art they needed for FryDays’s sister eatery Inspire Café, which opened last week.

The task was to paint a mural of a bowl of cereal spilling milk and hundreds of O shapes.

“Simplistic as it is, it took 20 hours of my time,” Mr Sousa said. “Any artist wants to make sure their art looks good. That is the first piece of art I’ve done on a wall. That is a business. People will look at it and say who did that? Moss did that.”

His hope is to put the money he has been earning from his freelance work back into the business by buying a Lumix camera. Until now he’s been relying on a friend’s camera to do photography and video shoots for various companies.

When he first started Moss Bermuda, he was working part-time. But in March he took the leap into full-time freelance work.

“I am still living at home with my parents,” he said. “They have been supportive. They were definitely like ‘are you going to be making money?’ I said I will be hustling. I am not exactly making a lot of money right now, to be honest, but I want to get my name out there. If I do good work that will help me.

“They still give me a hard time and make sure I am keeping on the straight and narrow, but I know what I want to do and what I have to so I am going to keep pushing forward.”

His ultimate dream would be to open his own studio or workspace in Hamilton.

“It would be somewhere that I could completely make it my own and work out of there,” he said. “I love what I do right now. It is a lot of fun. I have met a lot of great people.”

Before he started Moss, he had no idea how many creative, hard working people there were in Bermuda.

“The social media advertisement space is changing,” he said. “You are seeing a lot more Bermudian ads and a lot more ads in general on social media. Bermudian companies didn’t used to do that too much.”