Victoria Rosselli makes great design by embracing “happy little accidents”

One thing that’s helped Victoria Rosselli become the designer and creative she is today, is by adopting a “loose sensibility”. She doesn’t perceive herself as a “good” academic, or “traditional” illustrator, and so she dedicates herself to taking more unusual routes. “My design usually begins tight and then I go in and see where I can fuck things up a bit,” she says. Risograph has been a medium which has helped such an approach, with Victoria adding offsets in the original registration to manipulate the way it prints. “I realised that I was often producing great results out of those happy little accidents.”

One such “accident” is Victoria’s recent personal project, a zine which celebrates New York’s infamous Park Slope Food Coop. It captures the uniqueness of the space and how it operates, with gamified floor plans, up-close examinations of great packaging, and shots of the co-op in action, all given a rough charm with the slightly off-kilter printing. Publications also form a large part of the designer’s commissioned work. She’s a designer at The Wall Street Journal Magazine, and her work has been displayed in New York Magazine, Refinery29 and more. “I’m just happy to be able to work alongside great journalism or storytelling, and to see how I can use art and design to elevate the idea without fighting against it,” she says.

Victoria cites two main influences that might seem worlds apart: dance and Matt Willey. She trained in ballet, contemporary and jazz for 16 years, and sees dance as akin to design. “There’s the rigour and technique, the grid and structure, and that’s just half the battle,” she says. “The most difficult part of both is making it all look easy, achieving the perfect balance of pace and drama.” And it was when Victoria first encountered Matt Willey’s work that she knew she wanted to be a designer – she was attracted to the diversity of projects he works on, something now apparent in her own vast and varied portfolio.