Juan Carlos Garzón is a Colombian circus artist and clown. He has won government grants, performed at international festivals across Latin America, and spent years doing shows and teaching circus skills at one of the largest entertainment destinations in the world. He is not the kind of person you would expect to find at a government office in Bogotá.
I met him anyway.
In 2016 I was working at the Colombian Ministry of Culture as a graphic and web designer for the press office. Juan was there as a participant in the National Circus Laboratory, a government program that brought together circus artists from across the country to train, create, and perform. The program was serious. Selected artists worked with international instructors, developed new pieces, and presented them at professional venues. Juan had been selected multiple times across different editions of the program, which says something about where he stood in that community.
We crossed paths through work and mutual contacts in the arts scene. He was warm, articulate, and clearly someone who had thought carefully about what he was building as an artist. A couple of years later he hired me to build his website.
The brief was straightforward but not simple. Juan had six different shows, each with its own character, audience, and context. There was a clown show built around a flying cat. A piece about a mechanic clown who dreams of racing. A Christmas format involving a grandmother and her grandson. A physical theatre piece designed for unconventional spaces. A programme for very young children. And an international format that had already taken him abroad. The site needed to present all of that clearly to the people who actually book these things: festival programmers, cultural institutions, corporate event organizers, and international promoters.
A platform that reads like a catalogue kills that kind of work. Nobody books a circus artist because they scrolled through a list. They book because something about the presentation made them feel the energy of what they were going to get. That was the real design problem.
The visual identity made the direction obvious. Juan's artistic world revolves around what he calls the "yellow universe" — warmth, joy, a generous and slightly absurd view of the world that runs through everything he does on stage. Yellow is the dominant colour of his brand, his communication, his whole aesthetic sensibility. The site followed that logic without forcing it. Each show got its own illustrated icon to give it a distinct identity within the broader company. The layout stayed open and warm, with enough space for photos and video to breathe without turning the whole thing into a gallery dump.
Dancing Script for headlines, Open Sans for body, and a palette built around carnival warmth and desert tones.
I built it in WordPress. For a client who needed to manage his own content over time, update his press coverage, add new show dates, and not depend on a developer every time something changed, it was the right call. The press section alone made that decision easy. Juan had been interviewed and featured by multiple media outlets throughout his career, and that coverage needed a proper home that he could maintain himself.
The result was a site that works the way his shows work: approachable, clear, with enough personality to signal that something worth watching is on the other side of the booking conversation.
Juan is still performing. He has been working at the Global Village in Dubai for several years now, one of the most visited entertainment destinations in the world, doing shows and teaching circus skills to international audiences. A Colombian clown from Bogotá with a government grant and a WordPress site, performing in the Middle East. That trajectory is his, built entirely through talent and consistency.
The site is part of that story. A small part, but a real one.
Thanks for reading!
