Franco Grignani was born in 1908 in the province of Pavia. He comes from architecture, but his activity was kept in a constant experimentalism in the area of the new aesthetic and visual communication. New techniques that he proposed are the logical maturation of the experience of graphic design. The volume of his research was conducted in the perceptual process and the auxiliary of accelerations, optical distortions, tensions and inductions, now form a significant documentation of his work. The specialized magazines, books, exhibitions, and the educational material used in the schools of Italian art, English and American, have together contributed to popularize his experiences that influence the graphic design industry. His work was a refusal of means and of traditional painting; that is why his work was carried out solitary and strictly consistent, penetrating between the new proposals of science and psychology and succeeded to determine a characterized mark of our time. He was a member of the international jury of Typomundus XX/2 for the selection of graphics representative of our century. In 1965 he was invited to America to participate in the works of Vision 65 at the University of Carbondale, in Illinois (visual communications). His experimental works and graphics have been entered in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
He died in Milan in 1999.