I’m leaving Citynews

Closing a chapter is hard as starting a new one

After almost 10 years I’m leaving Citynews.

It wasn’t an easy choice at all. As my friend Emanuela told me: ”Closing a chapter is hard as starting a new one”.

My relationship with Citynews started in 2012 as freelance designer. I get hired to redesign their brands websites and community. Then, in 2015 they called me back to develop a responsive design strategy and renew the brand identity for all editorial products.

In April 2016 I permanently joined the company as Head of Design.

Looking back at my time there, I can’t believe how much was done. Here are some highlights:

• Directed the Product Design team working with and training lovable and skilled people that followed (and tolerated!) me over all these years
• Created a modern, solid workflow together with other departments and teams, changing internal processes and adopting new tools and methologies
• Designed the Citynews Global Design Language (GDL), a Design System that aims to build great experiences for all corporate brands
• Launched the redesign of both CMS and CRM internal tools, designed together with users from all departments
• Designed and launched both iOS and Android mobile apps, (from v1.0.0 to v6.0.0)
• Developed a Responsive Design Strategy, reviewing design, front-end and development workflows
• Released the new corporate websites (mid 2018)
• Created a coherent, flexible and scalable visual identity for all Citynews brands
• Designed and developed a front-end framework from scratch, using technologies such as Nunjucks, Git, Gulp, Node.js and Fractal

Now that I’m almost 40, this amazing journey at Citynews ends and I’m ready to start a new chapter.

In March of 2021, I was presented with an incredible opportunity. So good to my career and family that I couldn’t say no.

I’m happy to share that in late May I’ll join HCL Technologies — a global technology company that recently acquired selected IBM Software Products and operates in over 50 countries — as Senior User Experience Designer to help product owners, software engineers and customers to create and optimize the user experience of products.

It’s a huge step for my career and I’m really thrilled to start 🔥 🔥 🔥

This post was originally posted on my blog francescoimprota.com

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