The Spanish artist behind Miro

Adrián López
3 min readApr 12, 2021
The Hunter (Catalan Landscape), 1923–1924 at MoMA, New York

Over the past last years, Miro has become a popular shared space where companies, teams and people gather together for collaborative working.

Now more than ever when remote work is taking off, Miro app with more than 10 million users from all around the world is empowering distributed teams to work together more efficiency and effectively.

What many people don’t know is that Miro app name comes from a notorious Spanish artist. His brilliant, personal and abstract work was the main source of inspiration for building this online collaboration tool where every board is a unique canvas to be filled with bright colors and playful shapes.

The collaboration platform

The company’s product offers an engaging and intuitive experience in real time, without the constraints of physical locations. A endless list of user cases that goes from ideation and brainstorming to strategy and planning.

You can run productive, engaging online remote meetings and workshops with your distributed teams as if you were in the same room, anywhere, anytime. The platform gives an easy opportunity to build and develop new ideas, visual mapping, diagramming and research.

If this were not enough, Miro includes tons of ready-made templates to help you get to the point and be more agile. Ice breakers, sprint plannings, retrospectives, design sprints, and beyond. In addition to this library, everyone can publish its own template to be used by the community.

Customer centricity, user engagement or simplicity are some of the pillars that enable the success of this platform, but user interface and user experience are the foundations. Foundations that have its own name.

The Spanish genius

Joan Miró i Ferrà was a notorious Spanish artist born in the city of Barcelona in 1893, when the 19th century was coming to an end. His famous work has been cataloged as Surrealism although with a very strong personal style with which he soon gained international recognition.

The artist was passionate about modern art, claiming to have declared war on traditional art, creating abstract designs across painting, sculpture and ceramics. He had in other painting geniuses like Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cézanne an earlier influence, but everything turned upside down when he left his hometown.

Joan Miró moved to Paris in the early 1920s when he was only 26 years old. The City of Light proved to be the right place for discovering a unique style inspired by the artwork of children pushing the boundaries of abstraction. Paris was also the perfect germ for his personal growth.

Pablo Picasso who was living in Paris for severals years already treated him like a little brother opening the doors wide of his house. Both artists built an unwavering friendship talking for hours at the workplace of the first, exploring together new opportunities.

Over the years, they both influenced each other even though their own nature made them take different paths with regards to their creations. In doing so, Joan Miró disrupted the world of painting inspiring many others after.

How to pronounce Miro

Now we know who was Joan Miró you may wonder how this surname should be correctly pronounced and equally important, how you should pronounce Miro app in your day to day as consequence of it.

Miró which comes from Catalonia region in Spain is written with an accent mark, hence its pronunciation is mi-ROH with accentuation in the end. However, Miro is removing this accent mark. Thus, its pronunciation is exactly the same without accentuation so neither mee-ru not me-roh. Definitely not mai-ro. The only way to pronounce Miro properly is mi-roh. You’re welcome!

Back to the artist, whilst his original masterpieces are spread all across the world, the main locations to view some of his outstanding legacy are only two. This means the Museum of Modern Art more commonly known as MoMA, in New York and the Fundació Joan Miró, in Barcelona.

What are you waiting for to pay a visit? Don’t you want to know a bit more of the work of this Spanish artist behind Miro?

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