← Daring Creativity
Daring Creativity
Creating digital environments for deep storytelling - Nicola Ryan (Condé Nast) 🇬🇧
00:53:09
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- [00:01]
Radhy Malinich
Before we start today's episode, let me tell you about my latest adventure. Introducing Lax Coffee Company, a specialty grade coffee company inspired by creativity and creatives. The debut range is sourced from some of the best farms in Brazil, Peru, Colombia and Africa offering beautiful flavors and notes. Our single origins and house blends are roasted every Monday. For next day shipping. Visit luxcoffee.co.uk and use code podcast for 15% off your first order. And yes, there's exceptional merch too. Luxe Coffee Company is where art meets exceptional coffee.
- [00:51]
Nicola Ryan
But I also think Snapchat, TikTok, there's such a trend towards this. There's also a really deep yearning and a need and I think we see this with brands like the New Yorker where people do read 10,000 word essays and they do read them to the end and they read several of them and they come back and read them again. And I think that kind of depth is so important and I think is very much still wanted by our audiences. And I think as time goes on and I think as people see the surface of such bite squared content, I think there is going to be a bit more of a swing back to really wanting that deeper storytelling, that immersion of being able to really focus on one story for a much longer period of time.
- [01:26]
Radhy Malinich
Foreign Creative Podcast A show about understanding how to deal with the highs and lows of creative lives. My name is Radhy Malinich and creativity changed my life, but it also nearly killed me. In this season, inspired by my book of the same title, I am talking to some of the most celebrated figures in the creative industry. In our candid conversations, my guests share their experiences and how they overcame their challenges and struggles, how they learn to grow as creatives. A creative career in the 21st century can be overwhelming. I wanted to capture these honest and transparent conversations that might help you find that guiding light in your career. So thank you for joining me on this episode and taking the first or next step towards regaining control of your creative life. You ready? My guest today is currently serving as Vice President of Global Product Design at Conde Nast, where she leads the design strategy and execution across a portfolio of 22 iconic brands including Vogue, New Yorker, Wired and many others, and that is across 11 different markets. In our conversation, we talk about how the media industry is grappling with the tension between snackable content and and deep, meaningful storytelling, how newsrooms operate at breakneck speed, creating complete publications within 24 hours, and what other creative industries can learn from this approach to decision making and collaboration. We also get behind the scenes challenges of redesigning legacy publications while balancing editorial vision with commercial realities and how to clean up digital experiences to help readers focus on what matters. It's my pleasure to introduce Nicola Ryan. Hey Nicola, how are you doing today?
- [03:26]
Nicola Ryan
Hello. I'm doing very well, thank you. How are you?
- [03:29]
Radhy Malinich
Yeah, thank you for asking. I'm very good. I'm looking forward to this because you are true storyteller. What you do for your work and how you do it and how you've been doing it for a while is true storytelling. And I want to go to it because as a designer, every time I read the headline designers or UX designers or any designer should be a storyteller, it always filled me with dread. So I hope that we will get to know a meaning of storytelling and creativity through the session. But for those who may have never heard of you, how would you introduce yourself?
- [04:02]
Nicola Ryan
I'm a designer and design leader who creates produce products that tell stories. I've been working in media, in publishing for the last 10, 11, 12 years. And me and my teams create the websites, the apps and past lives. The newspapers, the magazines, Snapchat that tell stories quite simply. At the moment I head up the team at Conde Nast. We are the publisher that own Vogue and the New Yorker and Wired, Vanity Fair to name a few. And we work across all of those brands creating the websites and apps across all of their different countries to really bring the journalism and the editorial storytelling that the teams are creating to life and into the hands of their readers and their audience.
- [04:42]
Radhy Malinich
I can't wait to ask more questions because storytelling in such a, would you say tumultuous times out there, the narrative really, really matters. And I think in an era of snackable bite sized content where the headline can stir up so much emotion, usually a blind hysteria, uninformed hysteria. Where do you even start with doing what you do? Because of such a vast portfolio, how do you almost get people to take time and digest the content?
- [05:15]
Nicola Ryan
Such a good question. And I think nowadays what we see, it's not completely changed, but I think more so than ever people aren't giving the time to actually consume a whole story. Very few people get to the very end of our story pages. It's definitely not the majority of people that will watch a video to the end or scroll right to the end of a long article. So this definitely is a huge amount of competition for attention, isn't that? And people are really attuned to just wanting quick fiber of things. And I think there's a constant tension for Creating formats and telling stories in really punchy, bite sized ways. But I also think Snapchat, TikTok, there's such a trend towards this. There's also a really deep yearning and a need. And I think we see this with brands like the New Yorker where people do read 10,000 word essays and they do read them to the end and they read several of them and they come back and read them again. And I think that kind of depth is so important and I think is very much still wanted by our audiences. And I think as time goes on and I think as people see the surface of such bite sized content, I think there is going to be a bit more of a swing back to really wanting that deeper storytelling, that immersion of being able to really focus on one story for a much longer period of time. But I think it's definitely, as you say, storytelling is in such a tumultuous time and I think definitely in my job there's a need to be reactive and aware of what's going on outside of what we're doing and what trends and what people are expecting and what people are enjoying and what's working. But I also think there's a need to not be too reactive, to really stay the course in places and really identify where those places are. Because I think storytelling is such a human thing and it's at the crux of everything that we do right as humans, whether we're talking to our friends, whether at work, we all love a good story and there is, there's such a need for it in today's society. The quality is what's really, really key. And I think particularly the brands I worked for and one of the reasons I really love what I do is I really believe in the importance of that quality storytelling and that quality journalism. And you can't always do that. And by its sides, chunks and fast pieces, you have to be able to get deeper into the story. And I think brands that we have, such as Wired, is doing an amazing job of the, particularly in some of the US News of really going deeper under the surface of the story.
- [07:26]
Radhy Malinich
Yeah, you mentioned that you have to be reactive and aware of what's happening. How much of the technology have swayed the decisions of where you have to go with the content. Because in some choices we would not have chosen to do snackable content if you didn't have to. Like technology has driven this. I'm sure you would agree because you want to get lost in a story. It's nice to have a little taster like, hey, this this is the idea of a story. Would you like to know some more? But because it's so prevalent through content generation, it's so prevalent with news cycle, it's just we have created this noise machine that doesn't allow for too much, you know, focus in a way, because it's designed to make you feel anxious. It's designed to play on your dopamine receptors to go like, hey, there's more, there's more, there's more, there's more. And when you try to wedge in, I'm assuming when you're trying to wedge in a really good piece of content, almost like the bait in a pond, we're like, hey, I've got a really good fish here. Would you like to read it? Reactive and aware. How does that play integral part in your workflow?
- [08:31]
Nicola Ryan
As you said, there's such a torrent of information that we get, and media brands are a big part of that, right? As well as all of the many, many other people out there creating content. So many people creating content. We're all creating content. And how, as a user, as a reader, how do I figure out where the good stuff really is? And I think it's challenging, right? We all curate our various social feeds and our inboxes and we look for the good stuff. But even then, we're still drowning a lot of the time in that. And I think people are really looking towards for either people and individuals, and I think they're also looking towards brands. They're looking for a solution to this problem. And I think that's where a lot of media brands can play a part, because they can help navigate, filter, and really show you what those important things are. And I think we often hear that. I think the New York is a really good example of too much content is actually the problem. Sometimes we hear people unsubscribe because they haven't got enough time to read everything that the New Yorker writes. And they feel, therefore, they're not getting value for money. And it's almost counterproductive to create too much stuff because there is this desire for completion. There's this desire to actually feel they've gotten across everything and they've got everything that the New Yorker has to offer. And I think that curation is something that people are really looking for and willing to pay for. When we talk about business models and the future of these graphs, they're really looking for someone who's gonna, let you say, pluck this one big fish out the river. This is the thing. If you read one thing Today, that's what it is. And that was something that we really focused on when we redesigned the New York homepage of every day. There's one big read at the very top of the page and we make a big deal of it. Because if you read one thing today, and let's be realistic, you're probably only gonna read one really 10,000 word essay today. We're gonna make sure it's really good and this is the one thing we should read. We'll be back after a quick break.
- [10:19]
Radhy Malinich
If you're enjoying this podcast and would like more support and information on your creative journey, you can pick up one of my books to help you do just that. My titles cover branding, graphic design, illustration all the way to Career business advice with ideas how to navigate the highs and lows of the creative process. You can pick up signed paper bags at no extra cost from my store@nobmberuniverse.co.uk and we are shipping worldwide use code podcast for extra.10% off your order and you can find the links in the show notes. Any day should be a new book day. You mentioned that people curate their own content. Is there too much content? How do you decide? How much content do you actually need to put out? Because obviously, yes, having a 10,000 word essay every day to read, that's 70,000 words a week. If you do that, that's a novel that requires time. Because one of the notes I've made was time. I do remember back in the day when I was making myself very happily broken by working too much. I got offered a free subscription to a magazine and I was like, I do not have even time to open your magazine. You can send me what you want me to send, but I don't have time. It was my own problem. Obviously I made myself busy. I fall into this sort of productivity trap that I could make myself work all the time. And I've really neglected everything else. And I'm thinking, I wish I had subscribed to that. I wish I had that free subscription because I should have made the time. And I think, how do you almost educate people that there is nourishment in actually spending time away from the screen or on the screen, but actually doing something which can aid your process, can aid your sort of your thinking and your own storytelling. Do you have any insights into behavioral science, like how to get people to pause for a bit and actually spend some time on themselves reading and escaping for a bit?
- [12:16]
Nicola Ryan
Yeah, I think it's an immensely difficult thing and I think something we all struggle with right I've been trying to use my phone last and it's just an object in the room that's just glowing and trying to get you to pick it up. I think it's an immensely tricky thing because the majority of our stories get read right on digital screens rather than the print. Print's still healthy, but it's obviously numbers are going down and every publication out. It's interesting. And where we perhaps see the biggest success is where we get people. We have apps. Because when you have an app, you can enable people to focus, you can remove away the distractions and the temptations to click between this tab and the other. You can't obviously control everything that's on their phone and the other notifications that are coming in, but you can control that environment and means you can get people that you can strip out a lot of the interruptions and you can sometimes have less intrusive advertising and all these sorts of things that often come with websites. So I think apps is one way where we really see a path for particularly those brands that have longer form generals and like the in New Yorker, where people are willing to pay and it becomes a thing that you're paying for and you have access to it and you build more of that habit. I think we talk a lot about habits of really wanting. I think you're saying the benefits that you see from reading quality stories comes to habits. You're not going to read one story and all of a sudden your life is. Well, sometimes your life changes, but really it's about that accumulated knowledge and that dedicating a bit of time each day or each week. I think each week. It's probably more the kind of best analogy for some of these magazines. But you feel and you see over time that knowledge building up. I think the other thing that's interesting, another big area that I'm focusing on a lot this year is really cleaning up a lot of our experiences like we've had a lot of years, as many, many publications have had, where a lot of our money's been driven by advertising and at times quite intrusive advertising, because the general expected behavior is people come in often from Google, they read one article and then they leave and you never see them again. And they're often coming from Google or from social platforms. And because of that, our advertising models have had to be fairly aggressive. Right. We've all seen those sites which have sticky ads and videos that jump out at you because they've got one chance to really capture your attention. But what we're really seeing is this need to build out a much more loyal user base. The people that are coming back that you say that, they see that value and they keep coming back. And to do that, you've got to be providing a good user experience. You've got to provide an environment that people want to spend time in and where they can focus so they can really get that value from that story. So we've been doing a lot of work really stripping back and cleaning out a lot of that clutter on the page so people can really focus on the reasons that they came to your site in the first place, to the story. Basically, it's really clearing the stage and creating center stage for those stories to really have that impact and to really be able to express themselves in the best possible way. And I think a lot of the things that technology is such a gift in that respect of the multimedia and different options that we now have to tell stories and the blending that you can create on a single page between video and audio and text. We often say, how can we create the magazine experience in digital? But I think really the aspiration is to create experiences that are even better than print. Right. Because we have so many tools at our disposal now. The trick is really, how can we use them to tell our stories in even more immersive and impactful ways than we could in a printed magazine?
- [15:35]
Radhy Malinich
I liked your note about cleaning up the digital experience, because when you talk about intrusive advertising, I wish I had a still screenshot from somewhere I found years ago which literally imagined 1400 pixels by, let's say, 1400 pixels. It was about like 200 by 200 pixels. That was the article. Everything else was an ad. I can imagine how someone's willingness to create digital experiences died then because we have got taken over by digital advertising. You can't read whatever we write about. The story is buried. Is this what you got into writing, publishing, storytelling? Because it's buried. And I think when talked about, Google sends you to a page and you got one chance to make an impression. Impression is dreadful. It's bad. Like, it's just like, how is that a sustainable model? Because in any ways it makes you go away from that experience because you didn't have an experience. And if anything, you had a really bad experience. So I do like how you said that's how you rethink it. And there's more of a sort of loyal readership. There's more sort of a loyal audience because you mentioned in New York quite a few times. And I'm Guessing it's that sort of brand recognition that you can go and trust because you've got certain quality of articles from New York and other publications that you publish. We know how important it is to keep a brand going and keep it as recognized and as trusted. But how difficult is it to build a new brand? Do you create many new magazines and publications to suit the narrative out there, or would you rather focus on keeping the legacy brand more alive?
- [17:18]
Nicola Ryan
My experience so far has been more about tweaking and adjusting existing brands. I think when you look at a lot of different media brands over previous years, they more often change shape depending on who's the editor very much. They have slightly different preferences and attitudes and beliefs and takes on things depending on really who's needing them. And I think it's such a gift to have a legacy brand, a brand that people recognize and have some affiliation with that most times, at least in my experience, we've tweaked what a brand strategy is, what our values are to make sense for where we see an opportunity or where audiences are really interested in, in today's times, if that answers your question.
- [18:02]
Radhy Malinich
Yeah, it does, it does, because it's the most logical way of doing things. You've got a trusted audience, you've got audience, you've got legacy audience, you've got brand equity. But new magazines, new websites, new sort of publications do show up. And having been looking for a magazine for my daughter the other day in Waitrose or M and S the Trains, because the regular newsstands disappeared around most places and you see some magazines, you're like, oh, it surprised me. There's a readership for this because it surprises you, like, because people vote with their actions. Everything that we do is a data point. If you buy Wide Magazine or if you buy anything from, let's say, Vogue or Vanity Fair or if you buy Gardeners Weekly or the Sleep magazine, like, it's going to create a data point. What does the audience, what does the society actually need? And that's a delicate sort of concoction and delicate recipe of, like, how do you shape the narrative of a society, in my opinion. So you mentioned earlier that not many people make it to the end of the article. And I worked with someone years ago who wanted to publish elaborate stories on his blog and he's gone and found all the data on, like, how many people stop halfway, how many people stop three quarters. And this was nearly 20 years ago. So I think with all the tools and it's your digital experiences, like, how much of a Narrative can you or how much of a taste for a narrative can you gauge from analytics, from data points?
- [19:27]
Nicola Ryan
Yeah, it's hard to tell. I think it gets into a really interesting question. What you're asking is like how do you measure the success of a story? And I think it also becomes really interesting of how do you define success for a story? Is it a good part? Is has that person completed it? Is the first step, how far down do they get? How far do they scroll, how long do they spend on that particular page? But I also think there are other metrics. Particularly when you think about a story, often you want to also inspire action. And particularly when you talk in sort of media, you're thinking about what job is this story is of course playing a part in telling a really hopefully culture warming story and going to go and influence conversations outside. But it's also doing a job in terms of creating a business for that brand. So is that story going to be the story that gets someone to subscribe for example, or is it going to be the story that makes someone feel like, hey, it's worth paying my however much, ten pounds a month for this subscription, is it that story that's going to. Someone's going to see a bunch of adverts and that also pays that journalist salary through that way. But I think that the monetization aspect of it is also important and I think there's so many different dimensions to what a successful story is and depending who you are, still will have a different answer. But I honestly think it can be quite an intangible one to measure. So whilst we put a lot of metrics around it and you have to define engagement and to define how much you were able to monetize it, I think you've also got the aspect of just the ripple effect. What conversations does it start, how many people are sharing it, how many other media outlets are picking up on and rehashing it into their own stories. There's all of these sides to it as well. So it's definitely a tricky one to sometimes to measure but definitely day to day we look a lot at times spent our biggest metric, we don't care so much about page views, but we really care about the amount of times someone's engaged and on our site consuming, whether it's video, whether it's audio, they're just engaging with our story. And then we also care a lot about their return, whether they return to it again, whether we see them again, whether we know who they are. Because oftentimes you don't Know who people are, right? Because they're coming from all different sources. You have no idea who they are because they've never logged in. And some cookies are rapidly disappearing. We have no idea who people are. So we also care a lot about knowing who people are so we can better understand those habits and behaviors and better design for them.
- [21:48]
Radhy Malinich
I loved your answer because it's still based on the fundamentals of stories and conversations. When you said, what is the success of a story? And you said, is the action and is the conversation that it might stimulate and how does it spread? Because the reason why I asked you about data, because I sometimes feel like we are too preoccupied with how good the data is and what's the viral. Viral value, almost the stickiness and that kind of stuff. Whereas it goes back to just how you make people feel because you talked about humans and storytelling. It takes us back to very much the original point. The stories and storytelling was around us for thousands of years and there was no data, there was no digital devices. And stories spread. And stories helped us to make us actually make sense of what we're doing, kind of passing it on. So I want to talk about you a bit more now because how did you end up today with where you are? Because some people might know from this show, I normally ask people, like, where did they start and how does it take them to where they are today? Whereas I wanted to talk about a big topic that you do and then how do you play part in this? So human storytelling and your journey to where you are today? No pressure.
- [23:01]
Nicola Ryan
Yeah, that's a big question. I had a winding path into design. I almost didn't study. Didn't go into design. I was going to go and study German and Spanish and at the last minute changed my mind and studied information design. And I really enjoyed the kind of understanding and breaking down of information and how you make that make sense. But I quite enjoyed the sort of system side of that. And after graduating, I landed an internship at Pentagram in Berlin for a bit and then back in London. And Pentagram was just amazing. It was really this, my flight graduate school for design that you had the chance to really hone graphic design skills and ultimately communication design skills and learn from some really wonderful, inspiring people and really try to get good about the craft of design and graphic design. So it was a really inspiring place to work. But I always felt like the interesting part, the party was happening elsewhere because at that time the iPhone had just come out. Responsive design was just a fledging thing that was starting to come into being. And I really felt at the time that there were so many people out there, including all the Pentagram. I've only worked at Pentagram who are amazing at designing books and posters and corporate identities. And I almost felt I could never be as good as them. But there was this whole other area that was the wild west waiting to be defined in digital. No one really knew how to get good typography on the website, on websites, or nobody really had defined what it meant to define a great app then. So many things that were rapidly evolving and it felt like a really interesting place to be. So I did a lot of like projects in my third time and got into UX design essentially as it's called at that point, and worked as a UX architect for a bit in an advertising agency called Karmarama. It was interesting in understanding the sort of basics and mechanics of what was considered UX design. But I always felt there was this weird division because you had UX designers, you had UI designers that had to hand over the work at a certain point I was like, this is mad. Because designers should think across the whole thing. Design is all about how this stuff comes together and not just your sort of piece in the factory. And so I ended up getting offered a job at the Times of London, like completely by chance. I met the guy that headed up the team there on Twitter back when Twitter was really good and ended up going to the Times and they kind of thrown in the deep end. I had a team of a couple of people to essentially work on their digital stuff at the time. You end up making it up as you go along a little bit because I was by no means an expert in all things digital design. But at that point neither were many people. And so I worked on some of their new app at the time and we did some created stories for their daily app content that they created. It was a real kind of mix of like day to day editorial stuff, app design, new thinking for their new website, longer term strategy that we worked on with Ideo. It was just a really exciting time, doing a bit of everything and really gave me the bug for media and storytelling and working with editors and journalists. So I just thought. And the first time I went to the office and you just walk around and I just felt like coming home, I belong here. You can feel something sometimes in your bones and I just thought that this is right. So I was there for a while and then the person I was working with at times ended up going to the Telegraph, which is another newspaper here in the uk. And I ended up going across to work with him because we were doing a redesign of every touchpoint in the newspaper magazine's website app. And it's just such an unusual, unique opportunity. I mean, we only have a handful of major newspapers in the UK and the opportunity to redesign every touch point kind of comes along once in a blue moon. So I went open to that and that was just horrendously stressful, but also very creatively satisfying time. Like we worked very closely with all of the editors and really got the chance to rethink all of these different touch points. And I was ended up staying there long enough that we started redesigning them for the second time, which is sometimes you think this is perhaps when I need to exit. But the other part is you learn from all the mistakes you made the first time when you had to do things quickly, you didn't know things well enough. So I got to put things right the second time that I'd really wanted to do the first time round. And it was just a really amazing opportunity because ultimately my role, I oversaw the whole design team. So it was print, but digital marketing as well. So when we were thinking about how do we get more people to subscribe, we'd think about, well, how do we do that on the website? How do we design the marketing that goes in the newspapers, in the front of the newspaper, how do we design some of the call outs in the newspaper? And you think about the whole thing together and how you'd orchestrate it and how you needed to flex messaging and the visual language across those different touch points for different people. One day we were designing like Snapchat for teenagers and the next day we were designing print pullouts for the core audience who were more in their 70s and 80s. So it was a really interesting and diverse challenge. But I eventually had been there for some time and I'd also been in news for a while at that point. And 7day News is hard work. When someone dies or someone resigns, like you're on the hook and the gene's on the hook. You don't know. Never really feel you get a much of a downtime. You're constantly on call. And even in that time I had two young children, I've now got three. But work life balance was tough. It was tough times. This job came up at Convent, which sounded like my absolute dream job. When I realized what it was, it took me a while to realize exactly what the job was and like, wow, that sounds like it's made for me. So it's really focusing on the digital aspects, that's really what I find interesting. It's a massive system challenge in it because all of our websites are powered by one design system. So we really have to think cleverly at scale. How do we design something that can be scaled across where it makes sense, as many of our different brands as possible and across our different markets, this international. So I have colleagues predominantly around America, Europe, India. And so it's a really interesting aspect of how do you grow and run international teams and build global cultures and just amazing brands to work with that. I think having worked with news, transitioning into magazines, there were differences. There's obviously the content is different. We had some great content in newspapers and particularly magazines and photos, but you're talking about Vogue and Vanity Fair. The photography and the visuals are just something else. And the kind of care and thought that goes into that is quite astonishing. Just that stage of Met Gal is coming up on very shortly. Next Monday is just a humongous stage of the number of people and other media outlets that they're all looking towards to our experiences and our brands and our sites. And so it's just a lot of opportunities there and there's so much to keep me busy and to keep me interested. It's never a dull day, which I enjoy. I always have to be doing something.
- [29:40]
Radhy Malinich
I love your winding roads to where you ended up, because you were always going to end up to where you are today, in my opinion, because you said it when you were sat next to people in Pentagram, you said I was never going to be as good as them in doing what they did. And it's that realization, I think, of our lives, that you can't beat Zeigmeister in being Zeigmeister. You can't be David Carson by being David Carson. But when you yourself, when you double down on your curiosity, on your sort of self acceptance, you're like, ah, you know what? I am excited about these things. And those people who I don't feel I'm as good as them, actually I can be as good as I can be in the stuff that they can't really do because they can't keep up with the digital stuff. So you mentioned how you moved around from Pentagram to Carborama, then you went to Times of London and I got a sense that excitement when the digital stuff came in, it was like, oh, that's where the path starts unravel and that's where you come into the journey where you are today. But this show has got a subtitle about Highs and lows of creative life and careers. And you were describing the Telegraph redesign, and I thinking, wait a minute, that already sounds like a headache in the making. And then you have to do it again. I don't want to drag you back to the depths of Telegraph redesigning, but at one point, and I'm going to repeat it, like, I'm not as good as them. And now you're in a place where you're almost directing new challenge because you mentioned iPhones. The iPhones came up and Steve Jobs did a demo saying, hey, we can show you the whole website as it is. And everyone said, yeah, we're going to do mobile design instead. And that's been the charge ever since. And I'm thinking at that time, I was doing lots of websites. I'm thinking, is this an unnecessary evil? Like, why are we doing this? But then, you know what? I think it was worthwhile. I think there's a whole reason why we started doing it. So your personal mindset and your space in the room, especially with the Telegraph redesign, because you said you work with so many different touch points, data points, people, editors, designers, how did that feel?
- [31:39]
Nicola Ryan
It was exhilarating, to be honest. It was a really exhilarating period of my career. I think there's an energy that comes particularly in the newsroom. If you haven't worked in one before, it's hard to convey that in the newsroom, anything is possible in a day, because in a day you find out there's a big news event and then within a day, you've commissioned the editors, commissioned a brand new supplement, they've commissioned a whole bunch of photography, they've commissioned a whole bunch of articles and pieces from writers that had no idea that's what they were going to be doing today. And all of that comes together and is thoughtfully designed and created, printed in newspaper and delivered to people's doorsteps within under 24 hours. Which is pretty incredible when you think about agencies and other companies, when you think, okay, you need to create this book, this magazine, this pamphlet, and, you know, that takes weeks or months to plan, create, sign off, review. So there's very much a spirit of like, anything is possible, which is both incredibly inspiring, but also really hard work to deliver on and keep up. So the pace is fast, the expectations are very high. You know, you have to work very quickly and very rapidly and at the same time, try and temper expectations where you can, but you have to go with it. I think it's also tricky. As anyone working on redesigns, I'm sure has experienced that. You're trying to create something new and you're trying to change things. It's always uncomfortable, right? It would be easy if you just had one department you had as a client or a stakeholder. But the reality is you've got people from across the whole business, right? Something Editorial might love and you think will be a great storytelling feature. The commercial team, the advertising team might go, hey, that's going to completely kill all of our revenue. So that's no good. So trying to bring those different parties together is, I think, can be really tricky, but also can be really satisfying when you finally get it right and you get everybody on the same page and you get everybody aligned around. A kind of shared vision can be immensely powerful when you get all aspects of the business together. And I think a lot of my time at the Telegraph was really learning some of those skills. And I definitely made mistakes along the way in that. But I feel I learned a huge amount about how you bring all these people together with quite differing needs and differing arts, differing perspectives, and how you get them rally around once shared direction.
- [33:52]
Radhy Malinich
This is an interesting point because as you were answering this, I was thinking about the newsroom, the volume of the content that's produced on daily basis, which I remember my breakthrough point into getting into creativity. Even though I was a death metal kid and grew up in album covers and merchandise and all this stuff. I think the Neville Brody's Guardian around early 2000s when I just opened it up, wait a minute, this is making sense. This is what's getting me excited. And then how many pages every day? Like, who needs all of this content? It's like, how much of it doesn't get read to the end or how much of it gets lost. But it was the idea of, okay, this is produced daily and then there's a supplement at the end of the week. In fact, there's G2 and Observer. And I was like, oh, wow. And as you were answering this earlier, I'm thinking, what is the element of collaboration? Like, how do you get these people who get their assignments to write about this and write about that, Produce, design and that is there ever time to come together and actually have collaborative sessions and reflections and audits of everything's being created? Because even in a magazine world, I'm sure it might be slightly slower than the newspapers, but it's nowhere near the standstill. It's not a snail next to a sprinter. So the collaborative element and that sort of cognitive diversity of all the ideas, how do you even do this?
- [35:14]
Nicola Ryan
I think what's definitely noticeable about newsrooms and I think to an extent magazines as well, is just like the chain of command is strong. Right. I think a lot of our day to day design teams and so on are pretty open and everyone has a voice. But I think what you really notice when you go into some of those editorial meetings is that whilst there is open discussion, obviously as you get towards newspapers, it's super important that someone has to make a decision. There's just no time to wait. You can hear opinions, someone has to make a decision and people have to.
- [35:45]
Radhy Malinich
Get on with it.
- [35:45]
Nicola Ryan
And I think that's when you've got such limited time that on news it's such limited time that being able to make a decision is so important. And there are definite moments in the day, like on the newspaper used to have a morning conference when everyone would get around and discuss ideas for stories and sometimes the graphics designer would go along and be part of that because you'd be able to sometimes think, hey, this story's got great potential to do a big graphic on and tee things up there. So there is room for collaboration. But if there's very specific points in the day, and then you'd usually run through the day to sort of afternoon run through and you'd see, okay, all these things we're talking about this morning, how are they panning out very quickly decide if you have to kill some or pivot because you haven't got much time left or would need a backup plan. And then you start seeing how it's all coming together. So it's this constant collaboration because journalists are talking to the graphics team or talking to the art directors and there's this constant chatter. But also it's the case of having to plug everything in, seeing how it's come together and then having people, whoever directed the design that day, being able to make very quick decisions, the editor making very quick decisions. All comes down to good decision making, I think. And even if not good making a decision, I think that's always the worst thing that can happen is nobody wants to make a decision. At least if someone makes a decision, you've got something to run with, something to go with.
- [37:00]
Radhy Malinich
I love this. You talk about creating anew and creating sometimes things that don't exist. I love that you mentioned making decisions like it has to go out, it has to be done. I think the reason why the pamphlet takes too long because somebody somewhere has been given half of a brief and then they try to work it out. They didn't really speak to whoever wrote a copy or whoever actually needs the pamphlet. And then it's stacked it into lots of the other jobs. So therefore it takes so much longer and then it's more analyzed. And whereas I think there's something about a jump off point like it has to go out, it has to be printed, it has to be published. And sometimes just that's where the feelings of vulnerability, shame or overthinking go and take a break and sit on the bench for a bit. Because this stuff has to go out totally.
- [37:46]
Nicola Ryan
I'm a massive believer of just, you have to get stuff out there whilst it's like new and fresh and earlier. And I particularly mean that with the design process. I think myself included in Worst Enemy. Unless you sit on something and you try and get it perfect and then you share it with a bunch of people and they kindly point out some big holes and you're like, why have I spent two hours finessing this language? I hadn't got this main point in there from the beginning. And I just think so often in design, like you say you have some early work done, you want to bring in other perspectives, whether the designers are working on the print copy or some editors, often people in the revenue teams, because they're going to bring in different perspectives that help you shape it. And I think it can be our egos get in our way, entwined, certainly, because you don't want to put something out there that's not finessed and not as good as you think it can be. And I think it's so important. I think a lot of it is about the framing and just getting good at the framing of why you're showing people. And like, we know it's not finished, we know it's not done, but it's just how you get the best of design right. And it's not designing by democracy. You're not asking, tell me what you need me to do and I'm going to do it. But it's just soliciting feedback so that you can use all those as like data points to help inform the decisions you're making so that by the time it finally gets to the end, it's really well thought through from every different angle. And you do need a deadline. Like I really missed some of the deadlines of a newspaper and I didn't try to manufacture them for myself because if I haven't got a deadline, it can just drift on. And I think it really forces you to crystallize your thinking and commit, doesn't it? When you have A deadline. Otherwise you can just keep meandering on in your own heads going, oh well, maybe like this, maybe like that. But no, you need to make a decision. And once you've made a decision, you've got something that people can debate with or disagree with, but if you haven't got a position, it's nothing. So very much love a deadline.
- [39:30]
Radhy Malinich
That's an interesting manufactured deadlines because yeah, they need to exist, but we have enough space to actually think about stuff because there's nothing better than thinking about work. So since you mentioned manufacturer deadlines, I've been thinking about asking you how do you take a step away from it? Or do you read other magazines? Or like, how do you remove yourself from the world of what you do? Which is most likely to be bypassing just witnessing other people's content and other people's systems and other people's structures and other people narratives. Do you do that or do you actually try to really have a clean break and go home? I can imagine you spend eight hours working on digital experiences only to pull up your phone on the train home going, here we go for some more. How do you do this? How do you metabolize all of this information and work that you're into?
- [40:19]
Nicola Ryan
Exactly. You know what? This is something I debate myself a lot because in short, I always wish I did more. I could see there's so much stuff out there, isn't that there's always feels like there's more you should know and you should see. But like you say, the reality is there's a lot of work, there's not enough hours in the day for the job sometimes, and then you go home and you've got kids to look after and sort. But what I've really found is I think there's two aspects. I feel like I've really been trying to think a lot about how you have a healthy mind. If like eating healthy food, you feel good, you feel rubbish, if you eat McDonald's, you feel good if you've eaten a really healthy meal. And it's similar, I think you find with what you're reading and spending time within your brain. And I think there's two key parts that I really find. I think one, I have to just switch off because like you, I think I've probably spent quite a few years where I just don't switch off. And actually the value of just switching off means that you absorb a lot more of what's going on around you. And there's so much, we all know, so much inspiration and Just the day to day.
- [41:16]
Radhy Malinich
Right.
- [41:17]
Nicola Ryan
And everything that we see. So I definitely do try and properly switch off when I can in evenings and weekends. And then the other part, I really do try to keep up with latest news in the industry. What's going on? I often look to my team, to be honest, and we talk about how do you find these big fish? It's often through trusted sources. Right. It's other people that are in my team or old colleagues. I see what they're sharing. They often tend to share the best, the most relevant things. So that really helps me make the most of my time. And then I just enjoy reading and enjoy stories and as most of us do, so I'm always looking at what are other people doing? How's it working? I use our products as well and our apps websites. It's more part and parcel of the day. I can't say I have tried in the past of having specific time blocks in the calendar to go. You were going to look at other stuff and it just doesn't happen that way. You have to be organic. But I do find when I do have the time and make sure I have the time, that's when I get really excited about what I do. I think it's so easy just to fall into the trap of looking inwards and focusing on those deadlines that I've manufactured and all of the work to do that. It's when you look at outside and something new sort of nudges you or prompts your thinking that it's really energizing. And so I definitely find that kind of reward from every time I do it. It's just a matter of time. If I had a magic watch and I could pause the clock, that would be perfect.
- [42:39]
Radhy Malinich
I always say when people ask, what's the best time management app? And I'm like, it's you. It's your discipline. You choose to do what you choose to do. I've been reading recently courage to be disliked. When they say your life is decided here and now, this is what you choose to do. You choose to basically this is how you again, how you spend your energy, how you vote with your actions. This is what happens next. And I've been looking at this topic for quite a while. It's our own choices, but because we are often quite unresolved, we're like, oh, I'm blaming everybody else. Like, I thought when I was working for 17 hours a day that it was my clients who wanted me to work and then when I was not needed by them, that I Had to invent deadlines and self sort of projects. But that's our playground. That's the sand pit. That's where you discover things you might not discover. Because if you were to choose just to work for three or four hours a day, which essentially what we often do in eight and a half hour jobs from nine to five, it's the outside influences is that actually that cross pollination of ideas and working with other people who actually can potentially stay you in the right directions. It's interesting how potentially we get it right later but we do need to break ourselves a little bit and actually overwork ourselves because then we find our bottom, the rock bottom where okay, oh, I've touched the stove. It hurts. Okay, I might not touch it again but I'm going to get closer to it. Before I let you go, you mentioned you wanted to study German and Spanish. Where does German and Spanish come into your life so much so that you want to study at university?
- [44:09]
Nicola Ryan
I think I was feeling a little lost really about what I wanted to do. I think I had some doubts about going into design. Like what am I going to do with design? I don't know, what job is that really going to? Where am I going to go with it? I'd done my foundation year and I was like, well this isn't really what I thought it would be. I'm not sure I'm loving this. And that's when you used to do, maybe you still do it a foundation year before you do your degree. German. I always really enjoyed languages. I studied German to a level I spoke different languages. This idea of conversing, I guess it comes back to telling stories. But this idea of being able to converse to a different culture, I just found that really interesting. But I'm really glad I didn't go down that path. In a nutshell, you know, you look back on your decisions. I made the right call thankfully and it was all down to, I have to say I had a tutor at Central St. Martin's where I did my foundation and I was really umming an ARI wasn't going to proceed with design. And I got this envelope through the post and she had photocopied even a profile that I think it was, I want to say graphic magazine at the time had just done on this course at the London College of Communication on Information Design. And she sent it and it was some kind of note like you should read this or this would be perfect for you. Something along those lines. And she's right. I read it. I went to visit the Course I changed my application at the last minute. I managed to get in, but I honestly think if she hadn't sent that and hadn't pointed me in this direction, I probably wouldn't have, you know. Yeah, curious where I would have ended up. But it's really interesting how certain people in your career and certain people you encounter along the way that they end up playing these kind of pivotal roles you never necessarily expect at the time.
- [45:43]
Radhy Malinich
What was her name?
- [45:45]
Nicola Ryan
Lucy. I can't remember her final name. Lucy.
- [45:48]
Radhy Malinich
It's interesting that you said that she was part of that decision. She was part of that direction that's taking you to where you are today. The more and more I have a conversation on this podcast with people who go through mostly non linear paths, I begin to believe that they would always end up to where they are today. You might just be doing it with a German degree because I think our love and drive of what we do is somewhere deep there, deep within us and it just gets discovered sometime sooner or later. I think I had zero people regretting what they have done, know the choices they've made in their career paths. And sometimes you get people that are like, especially like the mortals and non creative mortals, they're like, oh, I wish I've done this differently. But when you look at your today, it's like, yeah, I've done it right, this has happened. And somehow even if you were to take a detour, you might discover something different. But I think from what you're telling me and what you're doing today, I believe you would have got there in the end. But thanks to Lucy, you got that quicker with 1 or 2 degrees from Spanish and German reviewer. So that makes the sense. But do you have time to look for stories or look for something that would bring you a different angle? Because the volume of everything, which kind of takes us back to the beginning of the conversation, the volume of everything is quite overwhelming. But there's still pockets of excitement, magic and undiscovered still left out there. What is the way of looking for all of these and almost looking under the layers and finding something that's potentially the next spark of inspiration or the next breakthrough.
- [47:34]
Nicola Ryan
I think it's about using your time wisely. And I've been reflecting on it a lot because in all honesty, I've been not using my time as widely as I could because of I used to have a long day at work or a long day with the kids and all you want to do is just mindlessly flick through your phone and I think I'VE been reflecting on that an awful lot lately and really reflecting on how much time I do that. I think Apple's free time usage is really scary at text. I mean you look at it all added up and you think and extrapolate that over a month or a year. So those numbers are powerful. And I've really been thinking about how do I better use my time? Quite simply, you don't have that much downtime. But when I do, how do I use it and make it massive? Because I think bringing us back to where we were at the start, that snackable, flickable stuff is sure it plays a job, it helps your mind. Just I don't know actually if it really does help your mind and mind, I think it just wires my mind and actually is that what I really want? Probably not. Is it really helping me? Is it really helping me in many ways? Probably not. So how can I be better using that time? And I've really been trying to take a concerted effort to stop with the flicking and use that time to just focus on a book, like to focus on something that immerses me, that I can switch off distractions and really immerse with me. And I honestly feel that more and more so people are swinging this way. I was inspired because someone on my team told me that they are limiting their screen time to 30 minutes a day. And I thought, wow, imagine if I did that, how much more time I would have on my hands. And I was trying it, but I would think, and I hope maybe the wishful thinking that there is going to be more of a reaction and more of a questioning of where we're putting our time. Our time is money. Where are we placing our time and our attention and hoping that's going to lead us back to quality because that's really what people ultimately value is like those stories that you remember, those stories that change something or those stories that unlock something in your brain that where I think and hope that we're all going to get back to and seek.
- [49:37]
Radhy Malinich
I think you're absolutely right about the movement because you did say at the beginning, like people don't have time and like how potentially is there to shift back to more longer content, more long form and reading longer essays. And I feel like because this is all happening with cross generations that we've obviously younger generations who are digital natives. You got generations like ours who didn't grow up with this stuff and it's just, oh, we are be more aware of potentially what it is but we still fall for it because the attention engineers that a really good job understanding the human psyche and the biology and our attention, like how to make us hooked, which is fair play to them. That's their job. But I think it goes back to that quote, your life is decided here and now. What do you really want to do? Like, how do you want to live this life? And if you are longing in your life, you're missing something, you don't feel resolved and which is lots of us all the time. Because no one will be 100 comfortable in their skin all the time, then that's a beautiful escapism. And we can just then see, like how we potentially motivate them or inspire them to put it down and say, you know what, there's actually something better to do with my life. So maybe I'm finishing this conversation on something and what we potentially wanted to start and finish with. It's like, how do you bring the content, even for conversation like these, to wider audience? By sharing how we feel people are not alone and thinking and feeling like how they operate with their phone and what their screen time says. Because again, this is the power of this storytelling, of how we can unlock more experiences and more relevant experiences to know that you're not alone. You will feel the same. You can learn from this and wherever it takes you, it takes you. Thank you for this. I enjoyed hearing more about Conde Nast and how you work and about you. For someone who drives the change in future, you're not immune to the impact of it, but you try to do a lot better job of it so the future generations will actually read longer articles and hopefully we'll scroll less.
- [51:43]
Nicola Ryan
Thank you so much for having me. It's been an absolute pleasure.
- [51:47]
Radhy Malinich
Thank you so much. Hey, thank you for listening to this episode of Mindful Creative Podcast. I'd love to know your thoughts, questions or even suggestions. So please get in touch via the show notes or social channels. This episode was produced and presented by me, Radim Malinich. Editing and audio production was masterfully done by Neil McKay from 7 Million Bikes podcast and the theme music was written and produced by Jack James. Thank you and I hope to see you on the next episode. Foreign hey, just a quick note to say thank you for joining me on this episode. If this is your first time or you're a regular listener, please take a minute and rate the show on your chosen platform. A short review helps every show to be more visible to new listeners and provide them with value. So thank you for helping out. Thank you.