Lazaro Gamio

New World School of the Arts

After high school, Lazaro Gamio wanted to be an architect or a video game designer. These days the 21-year-old can be considered an architect of news, designing infographics and building newspaper pages.

Gamio and his family left Cuba when he was 3, living in the Dominican Republic for four years before settling in Miami. He had an early interest in the arts and studied industrial design at Design and Architecture Senior High School, a magnet school in Miami’s design district. Gamio left Florida to attend the Cleveland Institute of Art, where he concentrated on product design, then switched to illustration.

“I realized I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life designing vacuum cleaners,” Gamio said.

When the recession hit, Gamio moved back to Florida and finished his general education at Miami Dade College, where a recruitment poster for the school newspaper caught his attention — but less for the opportunity it offered than for its poor design. It was the ugliest poster Gamio had ever seen.

“I was shocked that something so terrible was ever made,” he recalled. “I thought I could do better.”

Gamio joined the newspaper’s staff and soon became editor-in-chief. He and his staff merged the papers of three satellite campuses into one, The Reporter, a biweekly.

He is now studying digital media at New World School of the Arts in Miami. He also works as a multimedia producer and designer for The Miami Herald.

In his spare time, he enjoys drawing and designing beer labels just in case a friend of his starts a brewery. As a graphic designer with The New York Times Student Journalism Institute, Gamio hopes to learn as much as he can from the students and staff members.

“Two or three years ago I would never imagine myself here,” he said. “I went from thinking I would design Transformer toys to worrying about election maps.”

- Rebecca Rillos