Hola 👋🏼
Soy Mario

I was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, and moved to Barcelona in my twenties. Barcelona's home now, but part of me is always halfway back to a taco stand in Guadalajara. I'm bilingual in Spanish and English, with enough French and Catalan to get by, and I've never stopped noticing how much gets lost, or found, in translation.

I started out as an advertising copywriter in Mexico, before moving into content design in Barcelona. Early at King, a designer stopped me mid-sentence while I was writing an onboarding flow the way I used to write ads: one message, dramatic, precious. He said something like, if you want to tell a story, go write a book. This isn't a book, it's a flow. That's when I fell in love with product design. I stopped treating words like a finished product and started treating them like part of a system that guides people through an experience.

A few years in, I didn't know anyone else doing this work in Spain, so I started Content Design España. Seven years and a lot of mentorships, workshops, and job referrals later, it's still one of the things I'm proudest of. Not because I built something, but because a bunch of people stopped feeling like the only content designer in the room.

Along the way I've worked with teams across Europe, the US, Canada, and Latin America. Different languages, different cultures, different ways of disagreeing. It turned out the noticing I do between languages works on people too: most of design is translating between the people you build for and the people you build with.

These days, one problem space keeps pulling me in. Good content design has always come from judgment and taste, the kind experience builds, more than from any tone of voice guideline. AI raised the stakes on that idea: what you name things, how you structure knowledge, and what a system remembers now shapes how it thinks and acts. So beyond writing prompts, I design the context AI agents run on, carrying that same judgment into a new medium. Still figuring it out, but it feels like the right problem to be working on.

Outside of work, I teach, chase the best tacos in town (send me your faves), and shoot photos on film cameras older than some of my students. When I'm not doing any of that, you'll find me at crossfit or out on a trail run.