Matteo
Simonetti

It was October 1999, when I first met Alberto, Tommy and Cristiana. They were three friends that founded a small advertising company in my hometown and who gave me my first part-time job as a data entry temp for their website. It was a time when Adobe Illustrator was still a work in progress, way behind his more powerful and reliable CorelDRAW; where the websites in Italy were still rich in animated gifs, fluorescent banners, loading bars, and notepad was a more than sufficient software to create a webpage, and that was the place where I started to learn.

It didn’t take me too much time to realise that I liked what I was doing and so I worked in advertising as a freelance for almost 10 years, doing a bunch of other stuff as well, until I found myself working for the Biology department at the University of Padua as a technician in the imaging facility of the department. Before starting my job at the university I had worked mostly for cultural events; flyers, booklets, invitations, and art catalogues were my usual stuff and I wasn’t really into scientific illustration or data visualisation, I probably never even thought about that. So, I found myself a little bit juggling between the acquisition of images from biological samples through a microscope and the designing of scientific images I could barely comprehend, but this is the best thing of moving outside the comfort zone: new challenges and new things to learn.

After ten years I was on the move again, not to a totally different job this time, but to another country, and thanks to all the things I learned in the Department of Biology, and the passion for scientific communication, I joined the production team at the Lancet (an, a weekly peer-reviewed medical journal) in London. Being inside the newsroom is something I've always dreamt about, one of those busy offices that you see in the movies, where all of a sudden somebody could run through the office shouting: “hold the presses” because a piece of new extraordinary news came out to be published… and even if I’m not a journalist, and it might not be like the Washington Post newsroom in All the President's Men (and I might not look like Robert Redford), It’s still great contentment to see my work published and help the spreading of scientific research.

I don’t know how long I will be doing this, if for another 10 years or more, but I can definitely see myself working in scientific graphic design and data visualisation and I’m quite excited to see which will be the future challenges in science communication.