Informazione/Propaganda - Editorial Design

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"How social media can influence the democratic process"

We designed the Informazione/Propaganda (Information/Propaganda) magazine as the final project of the course “Design Fundamentals - Studio”, in the last two months of the second semester of the Academic Year 2021/2022.

The aim of the course was the production of an editorial product that, through the analysis of emblematic cases, peculiarities and problems, expresses a personal point of view on the concepts of civil participation, democratic choice and respect for basic rights, without neglecting the evolution and changes undergone by their public communication in recent years.

After deciding to focus on the big theme of information manipulation on social media, with the help of the course professors we chose to decline the prompt in the form of a "research journal", we did lots of literature reviews, both on local Italian news and scientific papers and on international universities works and research magazines, while researching we found the work of an Italian P.h.D. student at the University of Indiana (USA), through an article published on the magazine "Nature", his work on misinformation online was vital for our research, and later we were able to interview him for our new coming "magazine".

Pics of some interesting spreads of the book.

After the research phase we chose to focus on 4 main case-histories, one hyper local (a small but key legal case in Italy), one macro local (the election of Donald Trump as the 46th American President) and two macro global (the Covid-19 Pandemic, with a particular focus on Vaccines misinformation and the War in Ukraine, that at the time of the designing of the magazine was at the very beginning).

A shot of our Miro board in the works, some "meme like" qr code advertisements for our survey and a sneak peak of a table full of scraped data.

After defining the case studies we thought the publication needed also a "consultation guide", with a few key points and facts about the topic in general, so we built a vast introduction on the topic, starting from the definitions of keywords and arriving to a vast interview to the postdoctoral researcher we found earlier in our research.

Other spreads we think are meaningful.

Since one of the goals of our work was to create a "public utility" editorial product, we designed a poster to be included with the product, with a brief guide"to inform yourself better online" summarizing the content of the book.