Francesca has worked as an editor at The Guardian, Blueprint and ICON. As a freelance editor, she has collaborated with institutions including the London School of Architecture, Quality of Life Foundation, The Bartlett at UCL, and African Futures Institute.
Francesca was the editor of ICON, one of the world’s leading architecture and design magazines, from 2020 to 2022. She shaped, oversaw and delivered the quarterly print edition, popular web and social media platforms, and weekly newsletters. She simultaneously managed the overall editorial curation as well as the day-to-day production and long-term growth of the brand.
Francesca edited this book for Scandinavian practice C F Møller Architects, published in 2021 by Arvinius + Orfeus. The project involved shaping the vision for the book, commissioning and editing essays, unifying tone, writing captions and collaborating with writers, publisher, client and graphic designers to see the book through to completion.
Francesca was deputy editor of Blueprint magazine from 2017 to 2020. She managed the editorial content in each issue, to include planning annual themes, commissioning and writing a range of features, sourcing imagery, copyediting all content and working with the art director to prepare each issue for publication.
Francesca is the founder and editor of Thinking City, an editorial and events platform dedicated to exploring urban life and inclusive cities. Established in 2012, she grew Thinking City from an unknown blog to a widely read and celebrated platform with an international readership and 23,000 followers on Twitter. She has commissioned and worked with writers from Hong Kong to Mexico City to tell stories about their cities that connect micro narratives to macro issues.
As commissioning and community editor for The Guardian’s Cities section from 2014 to 2017, Francesca commissioned, curated and edited articles covering global urban stories, as well as built online community and reader engagement. She established the popular Cities on Instagram series, as well as the Border cities and Ageing cities series. Through ‘live weeks’ in Mumbai, Mexico City and Jakarta she worked to develop and nurture global audiences. She was the first person at the Guardian to harness WeChat to engage readers in China.
Placeholder
As part of her work at design studio make:good – which included brand strategy, communications and business growth – Francesca edited a newspaper for the practice, called Placeholder, which turned into a regular zine. With a mix of content written in-house and commissioned out, Placeholder aims to tackle key topics in the design, architecture and community engagement fields, while simultaneously promoting the work of the practice.
Francesca Perry 