How I made a 120-year-old look young again
What I saw as wrinkles of ink scattered on white beards of paper was a newspaper read by thousands of Sicilians every week. It wasn’t the content that was ancient; it was the process through which it was published.
Avvisatore was an economic publication, which had been published since 1867, and was still being produced the old fashioned Linotype way in 1990. That was the year I was called in by its Editor-In-Chief, Vittorio Pierallini. For those of you unfamiliar with the LinoType machine, get out your history books. It was a painstaking albeit noisy process of setting type in rows of brass characters to assemble text. Vittorio Pierallini, who was born in 1921, had called me because he was curious about how a young person would take his publication to the next level.
He had been a classmate of my father’s and was familiar with my job as Creative Director for the APM Italiana advertising agency. I took the chance to offer a completely different vision than what he might have expected: produce what had now become a magazine in house and only outsource the printing.
At the time, I was coming fresh from my experience with Fenicia Revue, which I had designed for several years in a row, and had discovered my passion for elegant typefaces and their contribution to “organized information”. The fact that I was proposing that a publication could be produced in a quiet office, sitting comfortably at a desk instead of in a loud sweaty basement of an old printing company was difficult for him to believe. However, he decided to fund the project, and though my experience with computers was at the time close to zero, I took the challenge on with my usual determination.
While considering the design of the magazine, I come across the inspirational writings of the designers at Pentagram, who had undertaken, among their many other admirable projects, the design of the Sole 24 Ore, the Italian equivalent of the Financial Times. The Pentagram designer said, “Each typographic element had to be interrelated to ease the assembly and layout in a situation of constantly changing editorial needs. The cake, so to speak, might vary in taste according to the cook and mix of the ingredients, but the appearance was always substantially the same.” I decided that the Avvisatore was going to be my best cake.
The challenge was not only the new design of the magazine (which had the structure of a newspaper) but the ability to harmonize the design with editorial problems- creating a viable timeline that would allow us by Thursday night to have the bulk of the magazine ready to print, leaving production of the cover pages for Friday morning so that Avvisatore would be as current as possible when it distributed on Saturday. It wasn’t long before I had successfully performed the facelift I’d envisioned for the publication. After that first new issue was distributed, I continued to produce 50 new issues a year for the next five years. I was pleased that the new look was received well, but more importantly, I was proud to have helped take such an admirable man and his only legacy into the future.
