Federica Fragapane on Visualizing Theatre, Children’s Books and More
By: Madison Hall
Tags: Design, Interview, Journalism, Data Visualization, Information Design

MH: What made you make the jump to freelance?

FF: I was receiving freelancing offers not only from Italian agencies but also from other parts of the world and that can be rare in Italy. So that was the main reason: I was very curious to see how my career would have evolved as a freelancer.

MH: You’ve written about this, but can you elaborate on what happened to your eye and how that affected your work?

FF: At the beginning of 2012, a few days before I started working at Accurat, I had a cornea infection in my left eye. I wasn’t able to see out of my left eye at all, I could just see a white smudge. And so, at the time the doctors weren’t able to tell me if I would be able to see out of my left eye after medications or not. I spent months under medical care. The healing process was particularly important for my design approach.

“Catalogue of the Extinct Species” published in Corriere della Sera — La Lettura.

MH: You talk a lot about ‘hooks’ in your work. Can you expand upon that? How did your work evolve and change after the sickness?

FF: It all connects to that experience, right? Yeah, so the visual hooks are what I try to design now. I was connected to them at the time. During the healing process, I used to do these daily tests with my parents to check the state of my sight in my left eye. I’d sit in front of a magazine — always the same one because it worked by always being the same magazine and same page. I covered my right eye (the healthy one), and looked to see if there were any improvements. And (over time), luckily, there were. So, I recovered most of my sight in that eye.

Day by day, I tried to look for these visual hooks and day by day they would slowly emerge from the pages. I really tried to catch my sight improving by catching such hooks. To me, it was really important to see if I was able to see more details than the day before. This changed my approach to design because when I started to see these details day by day and emerge, it really made me aware of the relationship that people can have with visual elements, details and these visual hooks. So this experience changed me. Now, of course, as the first step, I design the structure of the visualization after having analyzed the data. But then, I always tried to design these hooks in order to try to catch the viewers’ sight and start a connection with them, as I was using such details to start a connection with the pages (while recovering from the corneal infection).

MH: Are hooks something that grabs your attention or just some extra details that simply add to the piece?

FF: I’d say a combination. First of all, something that grabs my attention during my looking-for-inspiration process. So, I look for visual inspiration and when I find the texture, color or shape that captures my attention, I try to replicate it to start a connection with the readers. So it’s mostly something that yes, captures your attention but also is in the details. I think that visual details can have an important role in catching people’s glance (grabbing people’s attention). I think that the care that went from really focusing on the details can be understood more or less consciously by people looking at the pieces I work on and I think such care can have a role in their engagement.