Business and Finance, a 40 year long story: the graphic history

Business & Finance is also a story of graphic, and above all “typographic” reforms. The first forty years of life of the economic supplement of Repubblica coincide with the most impressive technological revolution regarding printing: when the adventure began, in 1984, the articles were still written with the typewriter, then passed to the printer, composed in lynotype and finally layout. The legendary iron “bench” on which the lead sheets were placed with great clang before the draft was laid out had recently disappeared, some computers were starting to come into play, but the scenery and the smell of the ink was that of ancient times. There was still a mythical figure, the “proto”: at Repubblica he was a very good giant, his name was Orlandone and no one knew his surname, but he was the revered head of the printing house and the man on whom the publication of the newspaper depended.
In this spirit, Affari & Finanza saw the light on 11 November 1984. The graphics of the first issues were very simple, and homogeneous with the rest of the newspaper. The chief editor at the time, Maurizio Ricci, asked the chief graphic designer Franco Bevilacqua for only two originalities: a double column on the left of the front page to report the week’s crucial news on the model of the Financial Times, and a “story” framed in the center always from the first of some lesser-known company, a column entrusted to the unforgettable Antonio Ramenghi and inspired in turn by the “World” of Mario Pannunzio so dear to Eugenio Scalfari who collaborated on it at the beginning of his extraordinary career. The founder himself wrote, and will continue for many years, the editorial of A&F.
On 24 October 1986 the first “revolution”: A&F became a real 36-page supplement separate from the newspaper. It comes out on Fridays rather than Sundays, its pages are pink (“salmon”, Scalfari specified), and the graphic project, the result of the creativity of Rolando Aloisio and Giampiero Lori, becomes more elaborate and articulated. First, among other innovations, there appears a portrait by Forattini of the economic protagonist who was most talked about at the time. All this to respond to the growing demand for economic information in a market that is “both sophisticated and wild”, as Scalfari writes.

In that phase, computer graphics, and computerized layout itself, are progressively changing the editorial work. However, in the early years, the titles were still composed by hand, character by character because they were particularly “strong” and different from everyday newspapers. It will continue like this for many years, in which Rolando Aloisio and Giampiero Lori were responsible for the graphics. The person in charge of the “cutter” with which the titles were arranged (as well as the infographics on the page also made by hand with meticulous craftsmanship), was a promising young graphic designer, Gianni Mascolo, who soon remained alone at the “creative” helm ” (when Aloisio and Lori went to Friday). It will remain there for a very long time, launching more than one graphic renewal project: the first issue with a color cover on 13 January 1997, the first “full colour” on 20 May 2005, the restyling on 12 September 2011 when AF was Massimo Giannini and our weekly magazine won the prestigious international award from the “SND society for news design” in San Francisco.

Graphics are now totally computerized, and indeed the operation to be done at this point is to make them as integrated as possible with the rampant multimedia in newspapers and in our lives. This need – the technicians call it “verticalization” – inspired the two most recent restylings of A&F, in 2017 and 2023, created by Francesco Franchi under the coordination of Angelo Rinaldi, deputy director and art director of the “whole” Republic. A wise and targeted distribution of news of practical use, which return to have the same location on the left of the page that they had originally, of in-depth articles that remain the main feature of a weekly magazine, of service news that offer continuous and immediate references to friction immediate access to web services (also with the use of “widgets” and “QR codes”), all this constitutes the information value of today’s Business & Finance. Who remains young and brilliant, as well as reliable and authoritative, despite having reached his first forty years.