Designing News

Italian designer Francesco Franchi landed a dream job after his studies of graphic and information design. He developed IL, Intelligent Lifestyle, as a monthly magazine to accompany Italy’s no. 1 economic daily, Il Sole 24 Ore. His ambitious doctoral thesis was interesting, but not yet a book. In spite of his busy schedule he decided to dive into the thematics again when Gestalten showed interest. So he (re-)wrote and designed Designing News, a lucid, up-to-date overview of newspaper design in the digital age. His focus being on typography and editorial infographics, and the language of some of his sources being Italian, Gestalten thought I’d be a good sparring partner for proofreading and editing the final version. I contributed a few details, but other than that, the work was straightforward: finding inconsistencies, checking references, etc. Franchi was quite happy with what I did, and welcomed me the next year as one of his students in an Infographics workshop during the Kerning Conference in Faenza, Italy. He also gave me a pile of back issues of IL, whose intelligence and wit in displaying visual data still baffle me. In 2016 he became Managing Editor at major daily newspaper Repubblica.