Johanna Agerman Ross grew up in Småland, Sweden, where her mother trained as an architect and her father directed the Jönköping County Museum. She studied English literature in Sweden and the UK, completed a graduation project at London College of Fashion that involved making a magazine about Swedish design, discovered to her surprise that she liked the wheeling and dealing involved, then studied History of Design at the Royal College of Art before landing a job as deputy editor of Icon, the monthly architecture and design magazine. At Icon, she felt the team was always catching up — stories they had planned would appear online, often using the same photography, before the new issue was ready. She decided to do something different.
In 2011, a year after the launch of the iPad, Agerman Ross founded Disegno — a biannual journal dedicated to long-form writing about architecture, design, and fashion. Taking inspiration from the discursive style of The New Yorker, the magazine insisted on a journalism of experience and criticism: going places, meeting the people behind the projects, and asking lots of questions. All features were accompanied by footnotes and reading lists to encourage further understanding. The pace of a biannual — Spring/Summer followed by Autumn/Winter, like the fashion cycle — gave the writers time for research and the magazine a travel budget that most design titles could not afford.
The gamble paid off. Disegno launched to critical acclaim and quickly attracted both readers and upmarket advertisers. In January 2016, a redesign by Munich-based Studio AKFB accompanied an increase in frequency from biannual to quarterly. Agerman Ross herself went on to become curator of 20th-century and contemporary furniture at the V&A, and later chief curator at the Design Museum, while continuing as the publication's director. Current editor Oliver Stratford has maintained the journal's commitment to depth, intelligence, and the conviction that design writing can be as rigorous and as pleasurable as any other form of long-form journalism.
If someone had told Agerman Ross exactly what the process would involve, she has said, she would probably have stuck to the day job. But the stubbornness paid off, and Disegno is now one of the most respected design publications in the world — proof that the medium of the print magazine is not dying but evolving, and that the readers who care most about design are the ones willing to wait for something worth reading.
Explore Disegno at <a href="https://www.disegnodaily.com/" target="\_blank">disegnodaily.com