I make creative work, and I build the tools and systems around it.
Design engineer / creative technologist.
Visual Lead on the AI & Automation team at Edpuzzle. Independent design practice since 2004.
What I do
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 attention. I find them, figure out which ones are worth automating, and build something that handles them. Usually scripting over InDesign, Illustrator, or a video pipeline.
Art direction and design systems
I still work directly on the creative side: editorial design, illustration, animation, art direction. Twenty years of making things is also what tells me what is worth building.
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 sketchbook that publishes itself
I wanted my drawings online without having to keep a site. I save a drawing in a folder and it goes up on its own, described and in its place. The page is a wall you drag in any direction, so the drawings get read the way a sketchbook does, in no particular order.
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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 a design practice since 2004, mostly editorial. 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.
About
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 an independent magazine while I was still in school. I ended up staying over five years, eventually running design and art direction.
After that I kept going on my own. I've always been a designer, and most of that work has been editorial: magazines, books, institutional reports, catalogues. I picked up the other things along the way because I wanted to know how they worked.
At some point that curiosity turned toward the process itself. Not instead of making things, alongside them: how the work gets produced, the systems, the tools. 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. What I make there is 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.
It's the same problem I had at the start. Back then I wrote style guides so a room full of illustrators would draw in one visual language. Now I write systems so people can generate images in one, which surprised me more than it should have.
I've also had my own practice running since 2004, with clients in the US, the UK and Europe. Most of what I produce there runs on automation I wrote myself.
I also keep a sketchbook online, at sketchbook.pazjuan.com. Quick drawings and exercises, published as I make them.
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