NewsGallery: VISUAL JOURNALISM: THE GRAPHIC DESIGNER'S NEW ROLE IN TELLING THE STORY

By KAYLA TASCHEN

"The graphic designer is an interpreter, the mediator in the journalistic [process]. What's more important, is the [designer's way of thinking] inside the newsroom," according to Francesco Franchi, the Art Director for IL, Intelligence in Lifestyle.

IL is the monthly magazine component for the Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore (The 24 hour sun), an equivalent to the Financial Times in Italy. Franchi is part of the new movement in graphic design for print: a reinvention in the use of infographics and the re-imagination of graphics use in general when it comes to paper publications—this, as a response to the new-media revolution.

Franchi admits that his response when it comes to the digital invasion in the publishing industry is more on the constructive side: "Technology changes, and we need to embrace and merge new languages."

Instead of panicking that new-media might possibly dominate and push aside the print business—reducing it as second best to its digital nemesis in the near future, some graphic designers in the business have decided to use the developing technology in publishing, as their weapon to bring it back to print—measuring up as viable competition with its beautifully, cleverly, and strategically rendered "New Visual Language."

Francesco Franchi is a renowned art director in the graphic design industry, and has won prestigious awards such as the European Design Award (2009) and the SND Mlofiej Infographics Award (2009), the 11th European Newspaper Award, the International Biennial of Graphic Design Brno. (See the heterogeneity of images via IL, featured below. Plus, of course the video of Franchi's interview, top right.)