Deliberate by Design: Pablo Alarcón Jr. on Printmaking, Platform, and Finding Joy in the Process

Pablo Alarcón Jr. doesn’t believe in accidents. Whether he’s designing the visual identity for BlackStar Film Festival or experimenting with stone lithography, every choice from type scale to tonal contrast is made with care. “Even when I'm being happy-go-lucky and very chill about it,” he says, “that's also extremely intentional.”

That duality, of ease and rigor, of play and precision, runs through every layer of Alarcón’s multidisciplinary practice. A designer, printmaker, and photographer, his work bridges digital fluency with analog sensitivity, always rooted in storytelling.

His path has taken him from Miami to California to Philadelphia, from being an Instagram-era image-maker to helping shape one of the country’s most dynamic platforms for Black, brown, and queer cinema. At the center of it all is a quiet, radical philosophy: that everything we see has been designed and deserves to be approached with reverence.

“I see the world as something someone spent time sketching, measuring, shaping,” he says. “That belief came from my grandmother. She taught me how to draw, how to make. She made me an artist.”

Design may be the profession, but the personal practice is broader. Alarcón’s artmaking is where emotion gets processed, where the excess gets cleared. “Design becomes the technical application,” he explains. “But my personal work is where I play, where I learn.”

That sense of experimentation has guided his trajectory, from a childhood fascination with Photoshop to a late college pivot into traditional printmaking. “I’m always trying to reverse-engineer things,” he says, laughing. “I learned digital first. Then photography. Then print. And now design makes so much more sense.”

In many ways, Alarcón is a builder of images, of community, of personal clarity. He’s also someone who has lived through the unique highs and psychic pressures of digital visibility. In 2014, during Instagram’s early boom, he and a friend made a pact: they were going to become Instagrammers. And they did. A few months later, he was selected as a “suggested user” by the platform, and his following jumped from 1,200 to 30,000 in two weeks.

“It was nerve-wracking,” he recalls. “It felt like this pressure to perform.” Despite the spike in attention, Alarcón tried to keep posting normally, resisting the impulse to cater to the algorithm. His feed became a diary, filled with photographs from spontaneous road trips to national parks, creative portraits, and color-rich moments from his everyday life. “I used it to find community during a time when I felt really lonely,” he says. “I met friends I still cherish today.”

That time also shaped his eye, training him to see light, symmetry, and design principles in the wild. But as his content shifted from landscape photography to more introspective, art-school work, his engagement dropped. “I watched my numbers tank,” he says. “And it took a while to untangle my self-worth from all of that.” These days, the platform is less a performance and more a personal archive. “It’s a diary. I post what makes me happy—gym stuff, coffee, small aesthetic moments. It’s for me.”

Still, his relationship to public-facing work hasn’t disappeared. At BlackStar Projects, Alarcón led the design execution for the 2024 and 2025 festival identities; conceptualizing, managing, and producing each year’s visual language under the guidance of Creative Director Leo Brooks. Alarcón credits Brooks as a mentor whose typographic sensitivity has pushed Alarcón to grow. “He plays with hierarchy and scale in ways that I find fascinating,” he says. “I’ve learned a lot working beside him.”

Designing for a community-rooted arts organization has shaped how Alarcón thinks about the public’s experience. “Accessibility is huge for us,” he says. “We have a lot of older folks who come to the festival, and not everyone wants to use a QR code or website. So we lean into print, clear type, intuitive layouts.” Whether it’s a physical brochure or a social media post, his approach is the same: make it feel welcoming. “If the design can quietly support someone’s experience without demanding attention, that’s the goal.”

Outside of work, Alarcón turns to movement to recharge. “Honestly, it’s dance,” he says. “It’s what I do when I’m stressed, when I’m happy, when I’m angry.” He’s not classically trained, he learned at family barbecues, at the park after church, and from hours watching America’s Best Dance Crew on MTV. In high school, he was president of the hip-hop dance club. In his twenties, that love of movement became nightlife. Now, it’s returned as a form of wellness. “It’s not social anymore, it’s for me. It brings me back to my body.”

Asked about inspiration, he’s honest: “I’m a bad student of design,” he jokes. “I don’t have a long list of names I follow. But Leo, he’s the biggest mentor I’ve had in this chapter.” That humility extends to how he views his own path. He reflects on his younger self, the teen in Miami teaching himself Photoshop, the high schooler in California drawing for coloring books, the 20-something obsessing over photography manuals. “If you told 14-year-old me that I’d be designing a film festival in Philly, I wouldn’t have believed you.”

What he does believe in is following the spark. “Whatever I was curious about at the time, design, photography, print, I just followed it. And somehow, it worked out.”

As BlackStar Film Festival gears up for its 2025 edition (July 31–August 3), Alarcón is looking forward to the chaos and beauty of it all. One film on his radar is Viet and Nam, a queer story that’s already circulating strong buzz. “Everyone keeps telling me I have to see it,” he says. “This year’s lineup is wild. I’m excited.”

Beyond that, he’s looking forward to fall. “I’m almost summered out,” he says with a laugh. “But I feel good. I feel grounded.”

It’s that groundedness—thoughtful, rooted, always questioning—that defines Alarcón’s work and spirit. Whether he’s designing for thousands or dancing alone in his room, the same energy threads through it all: intention. A deep respect for the process. A joy in the making. And an eye toward what’s possible when care is part of the craft.