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My name is Carlos Prieto. I’m a Design Director from Galicia (Spain) living in NYC since 2015.
I am currently the Director of The Fish ><////º>, a digital design studio in Brooklyn. I have been working to make the business goals of companies and digital projects a reality for over 20 years.
I like walking around NYC, cooking, shooting absurd short films, playing basketball, the beach, writing, and, recently, designing cryptoart.
Throughout my career, I have done a lot of different things related to design and management, and it is impossible to include all of them here without boring you.
I have added a few highlights of my journey below.
See you soon.
I started designing when I was 14 years old in a ZX Spectrum and I have never stopped designing and learning since then.
I studied computer science by “family tradition”. My father is now a retired software developer.
My first job was as Manager of Virgin Megastore music, film, and video game stores. I had the position of manager in three different cities directing teams of around 20 people. It helped me to understand how the real estate of a physical store works, to know the customer, to manage teams, and to have the responsibility in purchases and sales with weekly budgets and objectives. I also designed my firsts marketing campaigns here and got gold out of the data from their IBM AS400.
I designed my first HTML website in 1996.
In 1998 I joined Inditex, the largest fashion retailer in the world (Zara). There I started as a T-shirt graphic designer for their brand Pull & Bear. Then I moved to the Marketing Department and there I designed the first website of the multinational in 1999. This led to the creation of the Internet Department of which I was the first member and from which the websites of their brands were designed.
In 2001 in Barcelona I joined the multinational Mediapro, one of the largest film and television production companies in Europe. I worked in the Marketing Department and besides several corporate and film websites, I created a lot of keynotes to sell TV formats to the channels.
At Mediapro I was also the head of design for the launch of goal.com, a soccer website (currently with different ownership) that has more visitors than nba.com.
I also designed the portal for the Forum Barcelona 2004, a huge civic Olympics that few people remember, except for the infrastructures that remain.
In 2004 in Barcelona I opened my own design studio where we did many web projects but also became the reference studio in Spain for Motion Graphics. We made more than 50 openers for TV programs and many commercials. Here is a very old demo reel with some of my motion graphics works.
In 2004, a political side project I created with two journalists was very relevant. It was the Spanish version of Bush in 30 Seconds: Aznar in 30 Seconds. It was an online video contest in which the then Spanish President Jose Maria Aznar, one of the protagonists along with George W. Bush and Tony Blair of the meeting that led to the invasion of Iraq, was criticized from a humorous point of view.
The general public and professional media response was spectacular and we received hundreds of short films, animations, documentaries, TV ads, etc., and an important media impact, with the best videos aired on national TV. The online forum was a massive informative reference during the convulsive 2004 Presidential Election in Spain. This video was the winner.
Before the iPad existed, in 2005 I launched a “digital paper” magazine in glorious Flash embedded in a downloadable executable. A paper-like digital format whose pages you could drag and which displayed amazing multimedia content, so that an article on its double-page was accompanied by an embedded video or background animation, links, forms, and other interactive elements I designed.
The magazine was called “Abuse Magazine” and contained cultural, lifestyle and entertainment articles, interviews, and numerous collaborations by international artists. In addition to the monthly magazine, the blog was a massive success.
I wrote over 500 articles about lifestyle, design, and technology.
It was sponsored by brands such as Nike and Adidas.
In 2005 I published a 600-page design book on graphic design oriented to fashion products. It sold 10,000 copies.
In 2007 I returned to Inditex, 6 years after the first time I left, to become the Director of the ecommerce pilot project for the multinational: zarahome.com. It was an intense preparation and a challenge to go out in 15 countries at once. After the launch, I directed the inaugural 40+ people team (sales, photography, catalog, fraud, marketing, warehouse, customer service, etc) during the first year.
In 2009 I set up my studio in A Coruña to continue collaborating with Inditex, especially on design projects for zara.com and its apps, for which I designed the first prototypes of the ecommerce website and which now processes more than 1M orders per day becoming the world leader in online fashion retail.
I also designed websites for other multinational fashion brands like Uterqüe or Purificación García.
Among other side projects, I would highlight Mitwiz, a social network of geolocalized events that was perhaps born too soon; Mapache Guru, a recommender of offers for mass-market products, such as mobiles or TVs, which is growing at a good pace; Hawkings Education, a digital skills course for parents and teachers that is in development; and Qué Coche me Compro, a recommender of car offers that is a great success.
When I arrived in NYC in 2015, I worked at an ecommerce consultancy called Netamorphosis. There I led the design of several projects but also the management of their developments and SEO. I would highlight the project for the New Museum online store; the intense work of UI/UX and SEO for Newport Academy, leader in teenage rehabilitation in the US; a UX consultancy for the website of El Palacio de Hierro (upscale chain of department stores in Mexico); and the works for Frances Valentine (Kate Spade) and Aerin (Estée Lauder).
Since we opened in mid-2017, at The Fish ><////º> we have designed the UX and UI for dozens of websites and digital products in the fashion, health, legal, automotive, AR, fintech, audiovisual, and other industries.
Some of these projects can be seen in the Work section.