“I consider myself kind of a translator of beauty”

• On His Role

“I’m always inspired by beauty itself. I consider myself a kind of translator of beauty. I think everything is beautiful, sometimes it just needs a little nudge to show it, to display it.”

But Juano is not just a free soul connecting with nature all the time. He is also a perfectionist. A flawless designer and talented illustrator.

From a notorious advertising project for Nike to the sensitivity of Beth Comstock’s identity. From a strategic UX design system for argentinian director Federico Pintos’ movie to a conceptual piece of art based on the most natural elements; Juano is an artist who can simply find beauty in almost everything.

And that’s mainly because he disassembles everything into tiny little pieces. He explores and commits to finding the ultimate truth, the hidden beauty beneath all things. And he does that masterfully. He does that like a true surgeon.

No wonder why if he hadn’t been a graphic designer and illustrator he would have been a neurosurgeon. A career he started to study and would have loved to finish.

But the first assignments were on the city morgue and that was it for him. He loved the human body, its nature, and the mechanics of it too. He would have loved having the power to repair that, but the grey decadence of the morgue was too much for his colorful soul.


So something told him that drawing was the right path. And he followed that path. Mindfully. As he always does.

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“It helped me channel my experimentation and my need to discover and understand”

• On Graphic Design

But being a neurosurgeon and a graphic designer has way more in common than what we all might have thought. The human body is just a system. The human brain is just a system. A graphic approach is just a system. And so is a drawing.

The reality has to be systematized and transformed into a sketch. It could be improved, of course, even fixed. So as the human brain can be.

That’s why Juano was the perfect match for Churret’s, a project aiming to launch the classic Latin street food king “churros” into the heart of NYC. A project that needed someone who could dissemble and understand two completely different systems, two completely different styles, and ideas and come up with a solution to make both systems work together. A project only Juano could have mastered.

But his love for understanding the core of things was present from his early years, when he used to dismantle his fathers’ pens. Just for the beauty of it. Just for the quest, the search, the ultimate understanding. And that’s a kind of thinking process that never left him.

“I think even when I’m in the bathroom, and that’s a little bit overwhelming. That’s why design helped me channel my experimentation and my need to discover and understand.”

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“Sometimes is a machine that eats you alive.”

• On Design

That’s also why he loves teaching at Universidad de Buenos Aires. A place that allows him to find the right pieces to put together. The right elements to help potential designers find their own beauty, their own processes, and experimentation.

“Design is sometimes a machine that eats you alive. Timetables, budgets, hourly rates, etc. The innocence of experimentation is the most important thing about Design. The real magic happens when you allow yourself to be erratic and let things rest, taking their own time.”

This basic idea is what makes him love music so much, too. He’s kind of a Spotify celebrity. He follows over ten thousand artists and he even works on a collaborative project called CasaRua. A personal project that lets him set a new bar for his love of micro-systems and collaboration. A project that invites people to create their own playlists, while he designs a unique cover, with unique storytelling for each one of them.

Art, music, and systems in their most pure essence.

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“It’s a philosophy in itself.”

• On Macramè

And that essence is also what connects him to Macramè so well. A place where the idea of a system based on small parts collaborating for the common good takes a new meaning and scale.

“Macramè is way more than a network of collaborators. It’s a philosophy in itself. A truly humble approach to ideas. Here every project is built as a system. By a team. We can work on others’ designs or even make the whole process the other way around. And that makes ideas and results even better.”

No wonder why Macramè is a place where he feels at home. In peace. Like when he seats next to the river facing the sun.

And just breathes.

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