Gastón Lasarte

Product Designer · Buenos Aires

Everyone calls me Lingo.

I work where business intent, product logic, and engineering constraints need to become clear on screens.

Wired from the start

My dad is a radio communications expert — Morse code, circuit boards, soldering irons, antennas. I grew up taking things apart to see how they worked.

In 2002 our first computer arrived, and with it the internet. I found IRC, taught myself networking basics, then FrontPage, then the Macromedia suite — Flash, Fireworks, Dreamweaver. I wanted my own videogame site, so I learned how to build one and put it on GeoCities.

It’s still on the Wayback Machine.

My first website, 2002 snapshot

Grew up among the components, literally
The room this all started in
Field days, antennas, and a lot of listening
Taking things apart came first

My first portfolio, built in Flash — the same instinct as GeoCities six years earlier, with a bigger toolbox and every transition hand-timed.

Why "Lingo"

That same year I discovered Hip Hop. When my dad saw how hooked I was, he played me Cypress Hill — the track was "Latin Lingo." I took it as my BBoy name; it got shortened, and since 2002 everyone has called me Lingo. It’s my Slack handle to this day.

I danced and competed in Breaking from 2002 to 2020 — founded my crew in 2010 and competed nationally and across Europe.

A freeze holds or it doesn’t — there is no partial credit
The same room taught me lettering
A gym floor and a circle was the whole setup
The crew I founded in 2010, still the reason any of it lasted

Characters and letterforms

Graffiti culture pulled me into illustration. I never painted walls — I filled sketchbooks instead: characters, calligraphy, letterforms. Most of them now digitalized on iPad.

The sketchbooks moved to an iPad; the habit of filling them with faces did not change.

An iPad propped on a desk showing a finished blue character illustration, a café interior behind it — Same output, four hundred grams lighter than a sketchbook.

A decade of shipping frontend

I learned design at the University of Buenos Aires and taught myself to implement it — HTML, CSS, JavaScript, back when cross-browser work was a battlefield. I got very good at CSS architecture, which turned into freelance work, then frontend roles at OLX (Emerging Markets web team) and Strands (senior frontend on their fintech white-label products — i18n, l10n, RTL).

When "Product Design" became a discipline, I recognized it immediately: it was the job I’d been assembling pieces of for fifteen years. I’ve done it full-time since — designing systems and evaluating the code that implements them.

The battlefield years, reflected back
OLX — the Emerging Markets web team
FADU, where the design half started
Critique at the table, which is still how I work
The year group

The builder side

DOUP
Co-founded an urban training center: started building the space in early 2017, opened on a pre-sale of 90 students, and grew it to 460 — against a 400-student break-even — with 24 instructors, before moving on in 2018. Still running today.
Instagram
Hey Lingo!
My illustrations turned into merch — a personal brand I ran on and off between 2018 and 2023.
- Air Monsters, tee
- Air Monsters, hoodie
- Cactucín
Cafe de Saign
A design podcast recorded with three colleagues during the pandemic. All episodes on YouTube and Spotify.
Episodes
Four of us, one microphone each, eleven episodes.
Mentoring
90+ students at Acámica across LATAM (2018–2020), evening classes after full workdays. Plus ADPList.
- The last night of a cohort
- Same material, a university room
- And occasionally a bigger room
16 months on the road
From late 2021 to early 2023 I worked as a digital nomad, driving across Argentina with my dog while designing TruVideo remotely. Documented on YouTube.
YouTube