Recent publications
Trogu, Pino. "Giorgio Scarpa's Model of a Sea Urchin Inspires New Instrumentation", Leonardo 52.2 MIT Press, 2019, pp. 146-151. Click here to download PDF.

Trogu, Pino. "Counting But Losing Count: the Legacy of Otto Neurath's Isotope Charts" Visible Language 52.2, 2018, pp. 83-109. Click here to download PDF.

Trogu, Pino. "The Landscape of the Physical Book: Space and Memory in the Printed Page" TXT / The Book Issue, Amsterdam University Press, 2018, pp. 90-99. Click here to download PDF.

Trogu, Pino. "The Image of the Book: Cognition and the Printed Page" Design Issues 31.3 MIT Press, 2015, pp. 28-40. Click here to download PDF.

CV
Download PDF of my CV, updated October 26, 2021.

Bio
I grew up on the island of Sardinia, Italy, where my father, who was a mason, taught me how to lay bricks in a straight line. In Sardinia I attended the Istituto Statale d'Arte in Oristano, earning a diploma in industrial design in 1979. I earned a bachelor of fine arts in graphic design in 1983 from the Istituto Superiore Industrie Artistiche in Urbino, Italy, and a master of fine arts in graphic design in 1985 from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), which I attended on a Fulbright scholarship. I have taught classes in foundation design, drawing, exhibit design and information design, first at Virginia Commonwealth University, and later at San Jose State University. I have been on the faculty at San Francisco State University since 2007.

I am a generalist in both my professional work and in my teaching, with projects ranging from museum exhibits to web design and film, and courses ranging from letterpress printing and bookbinding to drawing, environmental graphics, and information design. My research focuses on psychology of perception, working memory, and cultural conventions in design, and their implications for problems of data visualization.

In the School of Design at San Francisco State I teach Introduction to Drawing for Designers, Information Design: Data Visualization, and Letterpress Printing and Typography

My homepage at SF State: faculty.sfsu.edu/~trogu
Pino Trogu YouTube playlists: Playlists

Visiting scholar at TU Delft, NL
Thanks to a sabbatical year, in 2017-18 I was a visiting scholar at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), The Netherlands, conducting research on bioinspired design and transformable origami structures (metamaterials), hosted by the bio-mechanical engineering department (BITE Group minimally invasive surgical instrumentation, Prof. Paul Breedveld).