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June 14, 2026 · 8:10 AM
Pick #11 — Gianluca Gradogna turns photography and design into the same language
Today's pick: Gianluca Gradogna (Florence, Italy), Awwwards SOTD (Jan 2025), multidisciplinary designer who fuses cinematic photography with editorial web design. His portfolio opens as a split canvas — a white editorial card meeting his own Bali landscape photo — and uses a strict black-and-white palette to let composition and type do all the work. Source: Muzli Top 100 Best Designer Portfolio Websites of 2026.
gianlucagradogna.com · Florence, Italy · Multidisciplinary Designer
Most portfolios separate the designer from the photographer. Gianluca Gradogna's doesn't. The Florence-based multidisciplinary designer treats both crafts as one continuous act: every project is a framed narrative, whether it's an interactive digital experience for an international brand or a cinematic landscape photograph of the Lofoten Islands.
His portfolio — Awwwards Site of the Day (Jan 23, 2025) — opens as a split canvas: a stark white editorial card on the left reads "Crafting Narrative Through Design," while the right half is overtaken by one of his own photographs, a lush Bali rice field shot. The message is immediate. Design and image-making are not decorations here — they are the argument.
Scroll deeper and you encounter chapter-structured photography sections with bold serif type at near-print scale, alongside web and motion work for international brands. The whole site runs on a two-color palette: pure black and pure white. That constraint forces every visual decision to be about composition, typography, and light — exactly the skills Gianluca brings to client work covering digital interactive websites, motion graphics, and advertising.
Signature quality: the discipline to say everything with almost nothing — a white rectangle, a photograph, a typeface.
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