This is the weekend edition of TheMarioBlog and will be updated as needed. The next blog post is Monday, March 26.

I am very honored to appear as a speaker in the Society of News Design (SND)‘s 40th anniversary conference, right near me in New York City.

As I go through the schedule for this year’s program, I am happy to see that there are many new faces of talented people involved in a variety of design jobs, and not always in positions that we have traditionally associated with design and designers.

You won’t find many sessions in this year’s SND program related exclusively to typography, color palettes and page grids. Here is a sampling of speakers and their topics:

John Maeda, Automattic

Computational Design and Inclusion

Allison Arieff, Editorial Director, SPUR

Better Blocks, Half a Plan, and Other Lessons from Urbanism

James Morehead, Product Manager, Google

More than Mocks: Achieving “Effortless” Design when Creating Bulletin, from Google.

We are visual storytellers

That is why I felt that my session’s title, The New Definition of Design, would be appropriate, especially coming from someone like me, perhaps the oldest speaker in the program and one who remembers the beginnings of SND 40 years ago, when design was not even a word used in most newsrooms.

I have decided to shake hands with the past for the first four or five minutes of my presentation, reminding this new generation of designers that we did not have it easy four decades ago as the first “designers” moved into newsrooms. In fact, they were not called designers, but given titles such as “graphics editor,” “managing editor for graphics” and anything that would not come near art director or head of design. Much has happened since those days.

Today, however, we are again in transition. My new definition of designer is one that involves an even greater collaboration between journalist and designer. I prefer to use the term visual storyteller, as that is what we are basically doing the most of these days. A good designer today knows that aesthetics, while important, is not the top priority: how the story is presented visually across platforms and the user experience provided are what matter most.

I also remind the audience that the WED concept (the marriage of Writing/Editing/Design) has never been more important.

My presentation will take us through multiplatform design, outlining the specific qualities of each platform, and outlining that designing for a mobile experience on the phone may be quite different from that of designing for the tablet, for example.

And the final takeaway:

Society of News Design New York: Celebrating 40 years

The Society for News Design’s 40th Anniversary Workshop, Creative Conference and Awards Gala will be in New York City, March 22–24.

Workshop chair Tyson Evans, of The New York Times, and an army of volunteers are organizing three packed days of talks, training, networking and inspiration about the future (and past) of storytelling, visual journalism and news products across print and digital.

Speakers announced so far include Scott Stowell, proprietor of Open and winner of the National Design Award for Communication Design; Jennifer Daniel, of Google; John Maeda, of Automattic and visual journalists from The New York Times, Washington Post, Axios, Vice, ProPublica and more.

I am honored to be one of the speakers.

If you would like to attend what promises to be one of the best SND gatherings ever, please go here for more information:

https://nyc.snd.org