Principal Designer — A Coruña, Spain

Twenty years where design meets the front-end.

I'm María Lareo — Principal Designer at Denodo. I shape corporate identity, design and ship product interfaces, and build the web myself. A fine artist by training and an engineer by degree.

Illustrated portrait of María Lareo
Brand & Identity/ Product UI/UX/ Front-end/ Design Systems/ Web/ AI & Innovation
About

A rare combination: a fine-arts eye and an engineer's hands.

I hold a BA in Fine Arts and a degree in Industrial Design Engineering — two ways of thinking I've spent two decades fusing. That mix lets me move from a blank canvas to a shipped, coded interface without handing off.

At Denodo since 2007, I've owned the corporate visual identity, designed and built denodo.com end to end, and shaped the UX/UI of the Denodo Platform alongside engineering and product teams — from trade-show booths to the product screen.

20+
Years across design & development
2007
At Denodo, and counting
2
Degrees — Fine Arts & Industrial Design Eng.
3
Disciplines — graphic, web & product
Selected work

A few things I've designed and shipped.

Drag an image onto any slot to fill it.

01 — Corporate Site
2007 — Present

Denodo Corporate Site

Denodo's primary presence on the web — and the surface every campaign, product launch and global event points back to.

Challenge

Communicate a deeply technical data-management product to enterprise buyers, while keeping one coherent identity across dozens of microsites, campaigns and landing pages.

Approach

Owned the work end to end — identity and art direction, page and component design, then the front-end build in HTML/CSS, Bootstrap and Drupal. Built reusable templates so new campaigns ship fast and on-brand.

Result

A consistent, maintainable site I continue to evolve — the backbone of Denodo's marketing and event presence.

Identity Web design Front-end
02 — Community
Denodo

Denodo Community

The home developers turn to when they're learning and certifying on the platform.

Challenge

A large, ever-growing body of tutorials, knowledge-base articles and certifications that developers struggled to navigate.

Approach

Reworked the information architecture and navigation, then designed templates that align the community with the corporate brand without losing its documentation-first feel.

Result

A clearer learning path that carries a developer from their first tutorial through to certification.

UX / IA Web design Content
03 — Product
Denodo

Denodo Platform

The product itself — where architects and developers do the real work of connecting and modelling data.

Challenge

Make a powerful data-virtualization platform approachable, without hiding the depth technical users rely on.

Approach

Designed UX/UI in direct collaboration with engineering and product — flows, patterns and components for complex data operations, balanced against real engineering constraints.

Result

A more consistent, learnable product interface across the platform.

Product UI UX Design systems
04 — AI
Recent

Denodo Brand Assistant

My recent step into designing with AI — turning a static brand guide into something you can talk to.

Challenge

Brand guidelines are long, and teams apply them inconsistently because the answer is buried somewhere in a PDF.

Approach

Trained an AI assistant on the brand guidelines and designed the conversation around it, so anyone — designer or not — can ask how to use the identity and get the right answer instantly.

Result

Self-serve brand answers — and a working proof of how AI fits into a design workflow.

AI Conversation design Brand
More works
Experience

Selected experience.

Principal Designer
Aug 2007 — Present
Denodo Technologies
Designed & built denodo.com end to end — visual identity, microsites and landing pages, front-end included.
UX/UI of the Denodo Platform interface, in direct collaboration with engineering and product.
All graphics for global trade shows — AWS re:Invent, Gartner D&A Summit, MWC.
Corporate documentation system — white papers, datasheets, solution briefs, annual reports.
Inbound & email campaigns (Marketo) — eBooks, infographics, banners and ads.
Social media visual strategy and content creation.
2007
Graphic & Web Designer
Medisnorte · Full-cycle Roydega website — identity to front-end
3 mo
2006
Graphic Designer & Interactive Media
Silman 97 · "Madrid tu Mundo" itinerant exhibition, Comunidad de Madrid
2006
2005 — 06
Graphic & Web Designer
Andar Quatro · Full design system for the IV Encontros Internacionais de Arquitectura
7 mo
2002 — 03
Design Internships — RENI & Glemso
via FUAC · Corporate identity, logo & print across stationery, uniforms and workwear
Early
Craft

Tools & disciplines I move between.

Design
Figma Photoshop Illustrator InDesign XD
Web & Front-end
HTML CSS Bootstrap Drupal
Product & UX
UI design Design systems Information architecture
Marketing
Marketo Asana SEM / SEO
AI & Innovation
ChatGPT Lovable Vibe-coding
3D & Modeling
Rhinoceros 3ds Max LightWave Solid Edge
Still a student

Twenty years in, and recently all-in on AI.

Master in AI & Innovation
Founderz · 2025
Master in AI for Creatives
Founderz · 2025
AI Product Maker
The Hero Camp · 2025
Figma Camp — Edition 8
Figma Camp · 2023
Education
2004
BA in Fine Arts
Universidade de Vigo
2003
Industrial Design Engineering
Universidade da Coruña
Beyond the studio

Board member and former President of Ecos do Sur (NPO, A Coruña), and graphic support for the Terre des hommes foundation since 2014.

Languages
SpanishNative
GalicianNative
EnglishC1 Advanced