I've been a designer for 20 years. These days I build the tools other creative teams produce with.
Design engineer / creative technologist.
Visual Lead on the AI & Automation team at Edpuzzle. Independent editorial practice since 2004.
What I do
What interests me is how creative work gets produced. Somewhere along the way the systems around the work started to interest me more than the pieces, and that became the job.
Tools for creative teams
Internal platforms, prompt systems, interfaces. The point is that a team can produce consistent work without a director checking every piece.
Production automation
Every creative process has repetitive stretches that eat time and energy. I find them and build something that handles them. Usually scripting over InDesign, Illustrator, or a video pipeline.
Art direction and design systems
I spent twenty years on the other side of the tool. Editorial design, illustration, animation, art direction. That's most of why I know what to build.
Work
From prompt craft to prompt systems
The teams needed generated images and the only models we were cleared to use ran through our cloud provider. I built the platform that made it possible, and then a prompt-template system so that everyone using it gets images in the same visual language. Six video-production teams, around twenty people.
Read the case study
A 200-page novel, typeset in a day
A manuscript arrived as a Word file with 3,345 paragraphs and not a single paragraph style. I built the typesetting system and delivered the interiors the same day. Every design decision was made by compiling the whole book once per variant and comparing them at the same sentence.
Read the case studyThe rest
Before I built tools I made the work. At Edpuzzle that meant style guides and illustration systems for animation, then leading design for the Science video-production team: art direction, illustration, motion, and studio shoots for the experiment videos.
On my own I've run an editorial practice since 2004. Ninety-two projects for clients in the US, Canada, the UK, Europe and Oceania. Before that, with a studio partner, came the institutional work. Statistical yearbooks for the Córdoba Ministry of Education, an award-winning report for Fundación Arcor, Revista Saberes, the Mercosur International Theater Festival.
If you want detail on any of that, write me and I will send it.
See the institutional editorial workAbout
I studied Visual Arts at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, in Argentina. Drawing and painting, specifically. In 2004 I got a job as a junior designer at a publishing house while I was still in school. I ended up staying over five years, eventually running design and art direction for their publications.
After that I kept going. Graphic design, illustration, editorial, branding, web, photography, video. I've always been the kind of person who wants to understand how things work, so I kept picking up tools and skills along the way.
At some point that curiosity shifted. I got less interested in producing design work and more interested in how the work gets produced. The systems, the tools, the processes. And a question that I keep coming back to: how do we use all these new tools to protect the part of the work that matters most, the creative part?
Today I'm the Visual Lead on the AI & Automation team at Edpuzzle. I don't produce pieces anymore, I build what the production teams work with: an internal AI image-generation platform, automation for video, scripts for Illustrator and InDesign. Before that I led design for the Science video-production team, and before that I was one of the illustrators and animators making the lessons.
The through line is the same in both jobs. Early on I wrote style guides so other illustrators could draw in one visual language. Now I write systems so other people can generate images in one visual language. Different technology, same problem.
In parallel I have kept an editorial practice running since 2004, with clients in the US, the UK and Europe. Most of my production there runs on automation I wrote myself.
I live in Córdoba, Argentina. I work in English and Spanish.
Contact
If you want to talk about a project, an idea, or just say hi:
pazjuanmaria@gmail.com