At a time when so many civil servants are facing turbulence, it’s worth highlighting why so many Americans serve. When agency life calls to so many creatives, what makes a designer select public service?

Juan Pablo Madrid – AIGA DC’s Co-Director of Programming – has some thoughts on this subject. A Guatemala native who left for college in New Orleans, he started his career as a designer in the agency world. After moving to DC to help his agency open an office there – and becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen – he felt called to contribute his design skills to the country where he honed his career.

Read AIGA DC’s latest “I Am Board” installment to learn more about JP’s first mentor, his work planning our chapter’s first big gala since COVID, and how he transitioned from leading a design team at his former agency to designing for the Library of Congress!

Tell me about yourself! More specifically, tell me about the first time you considered pursuing design as a career.

I’m originally from Guatemala, born and raised in Guatemala City. I have lived in the U.S. since 2012, when I moved to attend college at the University of New Orleans. I ended up in DC a little less than a decade later when my job opened an office here. 

I would say my first interactions with design were in high school. I was always creative and loved to draw, especially with my dad. Then in high school, I was in the National Honor Society and started making posters for fundraisers and other school functions. 

Still, I never considered a career in that. And actually, funnily enough, I remember one time that our NHS advisor asked me if I wanted to pursue a degree in design, and I was like, “No! Why would I attend college to study design?” At that point, I was just in the mentality of thinking the only worthwhile careers to pursue were things like business or engineering.

I ended up majoring in marketing. And really the only subjects I remember really enjoying were somehow related to design in advertising. I was always in charge of making PowerPoints for group projects, and it was around my junior year that I started getting asked to create posters, invitations, and other things on the side. 

Then, I did this informal internship at an advertising agency where my sister was working, and the graphic designer there taught me how to use all the tools that I had at my disposal. He was the one who taught me how to use the pen tool on Adobe Illustrator.

Wow. Is it fair to say that if you had not had your mentor, you wouldn’t be in a design career today?

Probably not. I ran into him years later and thanked him for teaching me all that he did, because I don’t think I would’ve learned what I needed to without him. It’s also worth mentioning that this workplace was really toxic, so it also gave me a nice little glimpse at the corporate world and what it meant to work at an agency.

This career was a surprise for me, and it felt at the beginning like a means to an end. But after that, I got my first design job at another advertising agency and was there for 10 years. I ended up running the full design department.

It’s interesting, because if I had to name one common denominator across these “I Am Board” interviews, pretty much every person I’ve interviewed so far has talked about the impact of a mentor on their design practice, which is a stark contrast I notice from computer science or coding where it’s very common to be fully self-taught and not to even have taken a class, let alone have a mentor.

My mentor was especially impactful in the sense that I didn’t go to design school. I didn’t major in design, nor was I surrounded by people in that discipline. And so for me, my mentor replaced the design education that a lot of people go through. 

In the early stages of being a designer, I felt very much that impostor syndrome of not having gone to design school. I worried that I wasn’t qualified. And then I ended up managing a whole team of designers, including some who had gone to design school.

I always appreciated that mentorship I received, and it’s part of the reason why I decided to join AIGA DC.

That’s a perfect segue, because we talked about your creative origin story. Now, I’d love to hear your AIGA origin story! How did you first hear about AIGA as an organization and then get involved with the DC chapter?

I was still living in New Orleans during the pandemic when I first got involved with AIGA DC. I was trying to find content or a virtual conference that I could sign my team up to watch so they could enhance their design crafts. I found [AIGA DC’s] DC Design Week, which was happening virtually, so that turned out to be the perfect fit.

At that point I was starting to think about moving to a different city, and I even jokingly asked folks in one of the chats if I should move to DC. People were like, “Yeah, it’s super great here!” So, that’s how I found AIGA DC. 

Once I moved here for work to open our agency’s office in DC, I wanted to apply for Shine, but missed the deadline. Instead, I attended an AIGA national conference here in the DC area for design leadership, and someone there mentioned that DC would open up their applications for the board. So I attended an info. session, applied, and became the Awards Chair that year.

I tried to get involved in the design community when I was in New Orleans, but it was not very organized. So, it was a nice plus to know there was an organization like AIGA DC that I could join to meet new people and expand my network when my agency in New Orleans chose to open a satellite office.

You mentioned that you started as the Awards Chair for AIGA DC. Tell us about that experience (including what AIGA 50 is), and then your role in organizing it as a new boardie.

[When I joined AIGA], I was tasked with organizing our AIGA 50 awards, which happened every two years. But at that point, we were coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, so it hadn’t happened in person. Bringing the Awards ceremony back with a gala to celebrate our winners in person was really important to me. 

When I started planning this event as AIGA DC’s Awards Chair in 2022, I hadn’t organized an event or initiative on that scale, and so there was a lot of learning to do. I became an expert on quoting things out for events, dealing with designers who were interested in submitting work for the competition, recruiting judges – I really oversaw each aspect of the full event, including the gala and competition.

I was really proud of the result, and I was honored to have a really great panel of judges, including Debbie Millman, whom I had admired for so long as a young designer. It was great to have her and our other judges learn about the work that’s happening in DC, see their faces as we evaluated each piece, and get to show them the amazing talent that we have in the DC area. 

So, despite the heavy pull of running this, it felt so rewarding seeing everyone at the Gala celebration and seeing the sense of community that this competition inspired. 

You’ve also made a big professional pivot since joining AIGA DC’s board, from working as an agency’s creative director into civic tech. Tell us how you made the leap.

I had been at my previous agency, Online Optimism, for close to eight years. It was my first job out of college; I started as a graphic designer and then grew into managing a group of designers. So I was quite attached to my work here, and deciding to leave was not easy.

Prior to coming to DC, I started becoming more of a civic-oriented person without getting too political. Then, certain events really made me pay attention to what was happening in the U.S. –  I was very thankful to have become a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2020. So it meant a lot to me, as a new citizen, to say that I picked this life and I want to serve the place where I live as much as it has served me.

I started my role as a designer for the Library of Congress in late 2023, after starting to look for new roles at the start of 2023. I’m a designer with the Congressional Research Service, and the Library operates by creating visual products for congress members and congressional committees, from infographics to visualizations.

It was a pretty big leap for me, going from a senior managerial role in a creative agency to more of an individual contributor. That was a pretty big jump for me. But the mission resonated a lot with me, and with my interests, in a way where I felt like I was serving the country and our legislative branch. And so it was a no-brainer.

What’s a fun fact that you think our community would be surprised to learn about you?

I used to foster dogs, and I’m very proud to have saved the lives of over 10 lives of dogs who had either been abandoned or were at kill shelters. I ended up adopting one of those fosters, whom I think picked me rather than the other way around. That’s something that I don’t think I share a whole lot.

I [also] love to cook. Outside of design, cooking has been my biggest creative outlet recently. I rarely really do passion projects, so for me, channeling that creativity into the kitchen has been a great form of self-fulfillment.

I also once designed a beer label, which I’ve hung up on my wall! As small as it is, that’s one of my biggest creative accomplishments, because I had always wanted to do it and I finally did it. I feel like we don’t talk enough as a community about the amount of talent and design that goes into labeling, and getting to do this during the pandemic for a New Orleans-based small cap brewery meant so much.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.