Where and what are you working on right now?

Currently, I’m working at Forbes as a Senior Art Director in the Newsroom where we’re publishing lots and lots of articles, oftentimes two to five stories per day. As an art director you have to communicate with a lot of different people, designers, writers, editors etc., sometimes it feels like the field of an art director is shifting more towards a visual editor. At the moment we are creating a style guide that will make it easier and faster for us to work in the future when some things like typography and charts are more uniform.

I worked in Editorial before but this job is where I’m feeling that I really do the things I love and it’s a lot of fun.

What impact has SVA MFA Design had on your career?

I love that question. First of all I was obsessed with getting to know my design idols who taught in the MFAD program at SVA and how they think and approach things.

They all have different fields, specializations and flavors to them, some more systematic, some more artistic. I remember I was doing a magazine for an iPad *something very new back then* and for that project I interviewed a lot of the professors. I remember talking to Sagmeister and asking how to be creative. I always wanted to get a sense of how these successful designers think and I was able to grasp and use that for my own career.

Another thing that SVA helped me with was: you have to figure it out. How you are going to approach something, with not a lot of time, not enough resources or knowledge – You still have to figure it out. Instead of being a designer that waits for directions we learn to solve problems, take them into our own hands, we learn to figure things out.

If you could choose a thesis topic today, what would you pick?

Honestly, I changed my thesis topic and I regret it. The thesis that I had going on first was way more editorial, kind of what I’m doing today but I have always been surrounded by startup people as I graduated from business school. So these people reached out to me and I took that project on as my thesis project. Today I feel like that was way more trying to do something right versus trying to really figure it out.

The project that I was working on in the first place was that I photographed a lot of different stickers that I found in the streets of New York and I still have all these photos. So I wanted to create a book documenting street stickers, first in New York, but then all over the place. So if I could choose again today I would go for something like that, definitely an editorial venture.

Portfolio: fernandocapeto.com