By Hector Mazzarri from an interview by Carlos Almenar
“I like to think that all Mexicans have my work.”
Juan Pablo Romo is talking about a 50-peso note. His name appears on nothing.
He is one of the people behind Mexico’s banknote engravings: portraits so fine you would need a magnifying glass to see the individual lines. His colleague Mario Hernández directs the design of entire banknote families, managing the composition, the hierarchy, the visual relationship between one denomination and the next. Together, their work passes through 130 million hands. Neither of them signs it.
In a conversation with banknote designer and journalist Carlos Almenar, both men reflect on what it means to make something that must never call attention to itself, and what happens when the system that produces it gets in the way.
The Line and the Whole
Juan Pablo and Mario do not approach a banknote from the same place, and that difference is precisely what makes their collaboration work.
Juan Pablo’s entry point is the line. Before joining Banco de México, he trained as a graphic designer and discovered the work of Marta Sasián, a master engraver with over four decades at the bank and one of the first in the world to work with digital engraving. The bank later sponsored his studies abroad, sending him to complete a master’s degree in engraving. He arrived thinking he had a solid foundation and quickly realised he did not. “When I got there, I realised how much I was missing, not just in engraving technique, but also in drawing.“
His free hours and vacations went to practice. His main teacher was an engraver named Bruno, someone who had dedicated his entire life to the craft and who gave Juan Pablo two essential things: technical command and the ability to notice subtlety. “Because if you don’t see someone do it, it’s hard to notice certain things.“
Mario’s entry point is the whole. Trained in graphic design at the National School of Plastic Arts in Mexico City, he photographed images for cultural publications before moving to banknotes. That photographic eye eventually became part of the work itself: Mario took some of the reference photographs that Juan Pablo later transformed into engravings. The collaboration is more literal than it appears from the outside. One man photographs a subject. The other reconstructs it in lines.
Neither, and Both
Neither designer is comfortable drawing a clean line between art and function, because neither believes one truly exists. “I’ve tried many times to understand what my definition of art would be, and I’ve never managed it,” Juan Pablo admits. A banknote probably is not art, he reasons, because it is not an individual expression of something internal. But then again, the people who make it pour something of their own perception of the country into it, particularly when they are designing for their own nation.
“So in some way, I think there is art in the banknote.”
What he does distinguish, carefully, is how function operates differently in each discipline.
“The function of design is very objective. It has to be identifiable in less than a certain amount of time, under certain conditions. Art has a broader objective, more ambiguous, more changeable. And if you don’t reach it, that doesn’t mean it’s no longer art.”
Mario arrives at the same territory from a different direction. For him, design is the act of creating a public object with a very specific job: to facilitate exchange, generate trust, communicate a denomination instantly. Aesthetic quality within that is not optional. “You can’t set it aside, and it’s no less important,” he says, and it must be earned through integration. “Everything has to come together to achieve a well-rounded product.”
That is also where the easy assumption breaks. Both men reject the idea that restriction kills expression. A visually rich, carefully crafted design is harder to replicate than a sparse one. And for Mario, creative freedom is not the absence of rules. It is the mastery of them.
Reading a Face
The most intimate part of the conversation is also the hardest to describe: how Juan Pablo makes a face feel alive. Ask him directly and the answer comes back hesitant. “I don’t know, I think it’s very hard to think about how I do it.” Then, slowly, he finds his way in. It begins before the engraving does.
“First I try to research the subject, if it’s a person, or an object, or an animal, whatever I have to engrave. And many times I draw it, even if I’m not going to use the drawing as a base. Because that helps you understand it better, to connect with the subject.”
Then comes the analysis of the photograph itself. Which features carry the expression? Which ones flatten it?
“I try to understand what features make the expression more beautiful. Or if it’s a portrait I don’t like much, which features make me not like it, so I can soften them a little. Or which ones I like more, to emphasize them.“
The result is interpretation, not reproduction.
“When I engrave, the main thing I think about is how I feel that photograph. I try to do something to it according to my own interpretation.“
And underneath that expressive layer there is always a technical one: how the image will behave in production, how it will resist imitation.
Throughout the process, Mario functions as a second pair of eyes. He studies the overall composition, the chiaroscuro (*), the expression, and will tell Juan Pablo: these lines are a little long here, and they’re creating this effect. “What makes Juan Pablo distinctive,” Mario explains, “is precisely his ability to receive that feedback and act on it.”
“He sees what’s happening there and has the capacity to see it. Not everyone can.”
The process pulls you in, the energy, the desire to create, and that makes it hard to step back. Juan Pablo steps back. And sometimes, Mario says, he solves things in a way that looks almost easy: “You say, wow, of course, that’s how it is. Nothing missing, nothing extra.“
(*) Chiascuro: from Italian chiaro (light) and scuro (dark), technique employed in the visual arts to represent light and shadow to achieve visual depth and tone.
The Score and the Soloist
To explain how a banknote comes together, Mario reaches for music.
“The design is the score (*). The engraver is the soloist, the master who plays the piano solo.“
Each contributor adds their own colour and texture, follows their own part, brings their own interpretation. Someone has to keep it all in tune. And the object does not end at the edge of a single note:
“A banknote isn’t just obverse or reverse. It’s obverse and reverse that has to relate to this other banknote, and this other one, and this other one. At the end, we have to achieve a complete unity across all our work.“
A family of denominations is a saga. Each note is a chapter that has to stand alone and belong. Juan Pablo puts it from the engraver’s seat:
“Design is something broader, which includes engraving as a small piece. The engraver plays a part of the score — but also puts something of their own into it.“
(*) Score: written or printed representation of a musical work, containing either single part (solo) or multiple parts (ie orchestral composition).
Bullet holes
This is the part of the conversation neither man planned to give. It is also the most revealing. “Something I think has happened,” Juan Pablo says, “is that the banknote stopped being an integrated object and became a lot of patches — a lot of separate things. Instead of designing a banknote that contains a security thread, the process becomes: where do we put the thread? Then where does everything else go? You end up assembling elements rather than building a composition. And I think that’s something where artistic value has been lost, and probably functional value too. A well-integrated banknote works better.”
Mario identifies the same problem from a structural angle. Security feature suppliers bring impressive technologies to the table: holographic windows, complex transparencies, tactile elements. But those technologies arrive with conditions attached. Don’t move it. Don’t touch it. Exhibit it in the banknote. “And instead of that marvellous thing being integrated freely, it becomes something so precious that nothing can touch it. You have to set everything else aside.”
The result, in the worst cases, is what Mario calls “balazos” (bullet holes): one element here, another there, another over there, nothing touching anything, a collection of objects that was never allowed to become a composition.
“You can see notes that at first glance seem fine. But this element is talking very loudly, and this one is talking very loudly — and you can’t see anything. You’re not communicating.“
The 50-peso polymer note, put into circulation in October 2021, was their answer to that problem. The security window is not simply a transparent strip. It encompasses a blind emboss with pre-Hispanic motifs, a tactile element, and a play of colour inside the contour, all of it placed so that it generates a single, unified image. That is the standard both designers hold themselves to, and the one they feel the industry does not always make room for.
The ideal banknote
Near the end of the conversation, Almenar asks both designers a simple question: what would the ideal banknote look like?
For Juan Pablo, the answer is rooted in process. The whole team, designers, engravers, production, printing, pushes forward rather than backward, working within the constraints that genuinely need to be respected and without the ones that don’t. And success, he is clear, is not measured by his own satisfaction with the image. “It’s a result where whoever uses it out there says: look how beautiful. I don’t make mistakes reading it. I see the number perfectly, I feel it, I can distinguish it — and on top of that, it’s beautiful.“
For Mario, the ideal begins with the right conditions. A direction defined clearly at the outset, and then trusted. A design allowed to mature in the hands of the people making it, without interventions that gradually clip its ambition. “Not because I want to impose whatever I want,” he clarifies. “But once a direction is defined, the development of the image should remain with the design group.”
At their core, both answers describe the same thing: a banknote conceived as a whole, executed as a whole, and trusted as a whole, from the institution that commissions it to the operator who runs the press.
The Empty-Note Syndrome
Banknotes do not carry names. The work is collective, shaped over long timelines by teams that evolve from one series to the next. “Talking about ownership of an image — it’s complicated,” Mario reflects.
“There are two major parts: the one who writes and the one who executes. Both are equally important. You can’t say: this is entirely mine. Yes, it’s mine because I’m part of it. But we are a group of people committed to generating something together.”
He draws a comparison to a recording: a masterful composition badly executed is still a failure, and a mediocre composition brought to life by exceptional performance is still incomplete. When any link in the chain breaks, design, engraving, or the printing room, the whole breaks with it.
When a project ends, Mario experiences what he calls “empty-note syndrome,” his term for the banknote equivalent of empty-nest syndrome. “We’re done. What’s my purpose for being here now? The images are gone.” The work is personal even when it is anonymous, not because it reflects the individual self, but because it contains decisions made by specific people who cared.
Juan Pablo carries that feeling differently. “I like to think that all Mexicans have my work,” he says, returning to where we began. “I like to think that all Mexicans have it and appreciate it.” And then, after a moment:
“It’s a privilege that very few people who make images ever have. And a great responsibility.”
Look Closer
A banknote is designed to be used without being looked at. That is not a limitation of the medium. It is the specification.
But the lines are there, and the decisions are inside them, about which features to carry and which to suppress, about how to guide an eye across a surface in a fraction of a second, about how to make a face feel like a person rather than a photograph of one.
The next time you take a 50-peso note from your wallet, hold it for a moment.
You are holding someone’s best work. They designed it so you would never think about that.
A Message Hidden in the Details
Juan Pablo’s hope is simple: “I want people to look closely,” he says. “The big picture matters, but the real art is in the details—the lines, dots, and textures that weave together to create something extraordinary.”
Featured image: “The engraving studio” © Juan Pablo Romo, “At the banknote design studio” © Mario Hernández, 100 Pesos Banknote ‘Centenario del inicio de la Revolución Mexicana’ © Banco de México, © Banknote Art Concept.
Images sources: “The engraving studio” © Juan Pablo Romo. “Steel plate with hand engraving using the burin technique” © Juan Pablo Romo. “From banknote concept to Housenote or test note” © Mario Hernández. “Artwork” © Mario Hernández. “Astrid: the drawing before the engraving” ©Juan Pablo Romo. “Astrid: engraving artwork” ©Juan Pablo Romo. 50 Pesos Banknote (detail) © Banco de México. “At the banknote design studio” © Mario Hernández. 100 Pesos Banknote ‘Centenario del inicio de la Revolución Mexicana’ © Banco de México.
