As winners of both a Sustainable Design Gold and People's Choice award for the project BOTITO, we sat down with Hernán Braberman, Co-Founder of Tridimage to discuss not only this project, but his journey, inspiration and what design truly means to him.

Can you tell us a bit about yourself and the studio

Tridimage started as an act of stubbornness. Adriana Cortese, Virginia Gines and I co-founded the agency in 1995, at a time when packaging design in Argentina was split between two worlds that never spoke to each other: graphic designers handled graphics, and industrial designers handled the structure. We thought that was wrong. If a package exists in three dimensions, it needs to be conceived that way from the very beginning, as a single idea.

Over thirty years that conviction hasn’t changed, and neither has the partnership. What has grown is the team: today we’re more than 25 professionals who share that same way of looking at packaging. What we’ve learned together is that brands come to us at a very specific moment: when they know something needs to change, but they’re afraid of losing what made them successful. Learning to hold those two things in tension, the need to evolve and the need to stay true, is probably the most important thing we do.

How did you get involved in design?

It started with my grandmother and a newspaper she brought home one day. She fled persecution in Poland in 1935 and arrived in Buenos Aires with nothing but hope in her suitcase. She learned Spanish from the newspapers that market vendors used to wrap eggs. She couldn't afford to buy one. Design was already woven into my family story before I knew what design was.

One day, she brought home a newspaper with a photograph that stopped me completely: Cobi, the mascot for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, designed by Javier Mariscal. What fascinated me wasn't just the image. It was learning who was behind it: a designer who worked across furniture, interiors, illustration, graphics, film. No boundaries, no single discipline. A single creative intelligence applied to everything. I was 15 years old and something clicked. I've been in love with design ever since.

You won a gold for BOTITO in the Sustainable Design category, as well as the People’s Choice award. What has it been like to receive this level of recognition not only from the jury but the general public?

Honestly, it moved us deeply. There's a particular kind of pride that comes from a win like this. A Pentawards in the Sustainable Design category positions Tridimage as a reference point for packaging design that actually makes a positive difference, and that means a great deal to us.

Designing with purpose has become a core part of how we work. It's not a trend we've adopted, it's been building for years, and it's now genuinely embedded in our manifesto. Thinking about the planet first is something we take seriously in every packaging design project.

Beyond what it means for us, we're very aware of what this kind of visibility can do for a project like BOTITO. Triple impact companies often struggle to reach wider audiences. When a design award puts them in front of the global design community, that reach can be transformative for them. We're proud to have played a part in that.

And then there's the People's Choice. That one still gets us. A jury of experts is one thing, but when ordinary people connect with a piece of work enough to vote for it, that's something else entirely. That extra layer of recognition is something we’re truly grateful for.

Tell us about your winning project BOTITO: the story behind it, inspiration, challenges...

BOTITO starts with a couple from Argentina, José María Rodríguez and Daniela Czajkowski, and a question. Looking at mountains of plastic waste heading for open-air landfills they asked "what could this become?". The answer was a robot toy made entirely from recovered plastics, each one unique because the raw material is unpredictable. The project is built around environmental education: teaching children that what looks like rubbish can have a second life.

When they came to us, the challenge was to create packaging that lived up to what the product was actually saying. It couldn’t be something that immediately ended up in the trash. So the packaging itself became part of the story. We worked with 100% recycled paper pulp, shaped using 3D-printed moulds to minimise waste, finished with biodegradable water-based inks, and paired with a recyclable cardboard sleeve. The uncoated pulp surface was a deliberate choice, we wanted the material to be honest.

The concept we kept coming back to was meta-packaging: the container doesn't just protect the product, it is the message. That’s why the form references a bin. It's designed to be recycled, composted, or creatively reused once it's served its purpose. We wanted BOTITO's packaging to feel playful and genuine, just like the toy inside.

You’ve also been a Pentawards Jury member, what would you say to people thinking about entering for the first time and do you have any tips for them?

Enter. That sounds simple, but a lot of designers hold back waiting for the project they consider perfect. What I learned sitting on the jury is that what moves people is honesty. Work that comes from a real problem, solved with genuine intention, communicates that immediately. You don’t need to be from a large studio or a well-known market for your work to resonate.

One practical piece of advice: help the jury understand context. What were you working against? What did the brand need that it couldn’t yet see? The best entries frame the problem as clearly as they show the solution.

Pentawards is turning 20 this year, what’s your most standout design memory or project from the past 20 years?

The night at the 2017 gala when we won our Pentaward for Gond Wana, a premium water brand from Paraguay in a category that didn’t even exist in that market before we designed the bottle. A faceted glass inspired by a diamond, born from a single phrase the client said during the briefing: “More than water, it’s a jewel.” Hearing a client say “Tridimage turned our dreams into reality” is a feeling you don’t forget.

That same night I met Uwe Melichar from the The European Brand & Packaging Design Association, and Adam Ryan, Head of Pentawards, for the first time. That’s another thing Pentawards does: it creates connections that last. Twenty years of that kind of community is worth celebrating properly.

Do you have any exciting projects coming up that you can share with us?

It’s called DIVERSA, and it started when UPM commissioned us to design a tequila label. From that brief came an idea that excited us more than the project itself: what if instead of working alone, we invited four other design agencies from across Latin America to build it together? Think of it like a music collaboration, different artists, one track. We brought in agencies from Argentina, Chile, Peru and Colombia, each contributing their own perspective on what luxury and cultural identity mean in this region. That almost never happens in this industry. Studios protect their creative voice. The interesting question was whether five distinct voices could become something none of them would have made alone.

How do you manage to stay creative and find inspiration?

I don't wait for inspiration. I stay attentive. Curious about how different generations relate to brands, what they trust, what they reject, what they need a product to say about them. How retail dynamics shift, what technology makes possible and what it takes away. Most of my best ideas haven't come from looking at other packaging, but from understanding a constraint deeply enough to find the opportunity inside it.

My grandmother arrived in Argentina with nothing and built a life from scratch. That image never leaves me. Creativity under constraint isn’t a method I learned. It’s something I inherited.

To you, what is the power of design?

Beauty, to me, is not decoration. It’s the quality something has when it works exactly as it should, when form, function and meaning all pull in the same direction. That’s the power of design: it embellishes the relationship between people and products by making it more honest, more clear, more human. In that sense the work is never finished and always challenging.

But working on Akamasoa made something else concrete for me. When a community of people who had been told their whole lives that they were recipients of charity became the authors of their own visual identity, something shifted. A jam label became a badge of pride. It represented their journey, their resilience, their sense of themselves as creators. That’s not decoration. That’s design at its most powerful: shaping not things, but dignity. Akamasoa went on to win a Gold Pentaward in the Design with Purpose category, which felt like exactly the right kind of recognition for work that was never about the award.

What would you say to your younger designer self, or to students wanting to get into the industry?

I would say: don’t let the hunger for experience work against depth. The younger generations have access to an extraordinary amount of stimulus, and that’s a gift. But in that constant shopping for new experiences, it’s easy to miss the value of giving time to time. And follow the improbable connections.

I became a designer because of Javier Mariscal. Years later, we shared a design credit on Papa Andrés rum. And after that, I got to interview him on my podcast BRANDERMAN, and tell him in person that he was the reason I became a designer. That kind of full-circle moment doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because you follow your curiosity with enough persistence, and you never stop being in love with what you do.

Want to be a people's choice winner? Enter the 2026 competition for a chance to be in the running!