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Wired magazine – Scott Dadich @ EDO 23/04/09

Scott Dadich shows a sketch for a cover featuring Martha Stewart baking a WII-shaped cake. Photo courtesy of Jay Prynne

EDO had the pleasure of welcoming US Wired Creative Director Scott Dadich to talk last week. This was always an exciting prospect, as Wired has been a leading force in editorial design for several years. As Simon points out on Eye Blog, the magazine has a history of creative design, but even allowing for that, it’s current incarnation is something special.

From a UK perspective this can be partly be credited to the size of the creative team involved in creating the pages each month. A quick comparison between Dadich’s team and the team responsible for the recently launched UK edition of Wired is useful here. During his talk he named the fifteen people in his team. The UK magazine lists three people on design/pictures.

Of course, a large team can bring it’s own problems – plenty of American magazines are mired in indecision and bad management that fails to get the best from the team. Many US editorial designers envy the spontaneity that our small teams provide. But build and manage the team well and you can acheive great things, as became clear during Dadich’s presentation.

I’ve attended, organised and delivered enough talks to claim a realistic expectation of such events. You always hope a talk or panel discussion will be life-changing in some respect, but the reality is generally a little more down to earth. You might hear a great character delivering amusing anecdotes. You might get shown some stunning work. You may pick up one or two helpful tips, or even get to look at something in a different way. You should never expect it all in one sitting.

Yet that’s exactly what Scott Dadich managed at the Soho Hotel last week. His presentation was that most simple of forms, an overview of what he and his team do on Wired, but his personality, wit and evident love of magazines made the event truely inspirational.

Often speakers show finished work and provide a vague disposition on it’s development. Dadich had programmed a careful trawl through some of the creative highlights from Wired, showing initial sketches and early prototypes of covers and concepts. It would have been easy for him to just show some great work, but he wanted to share his thinking and demonstrate the importance of ideas. That he and his team get to work with some of the best photographers, illustrators and creatives made this an even more engaging journey. The pages of Wired carry a typically American level of attention to detail, and that same quality was applied to the style of Dadich’s presentation. Keynote is a great application, but on this evidence I’ve only scratched the surface of what it can do.

Dadich ended the talk by revealing the latest issue of Wired, a special mystery issue, above, guest-edited by JJ Abrams and redesigned in a fifties style, pastiching early mass editorial design and magic trick packaging. This new issue sums up everything that is special about the magazine. Working in an area where there is no fixed idea of what a ‘normal’ approach is, the team (and credit must be given to the editorial staff led by Chris Anderson) have consistently taken what might otherwise be heavy, dry content and made it visually stunning through a desire to make that content engaging.

Dadich has a deep knowledge of, and love for, editorial design, and has found the perfect vehicle to experiment with the form. His work reminds me of the best record sleeve designs of my youth– reflecting a love of design history and willingness to share enjoyment of the process (The mystery issue is full of editorial and visual puzzles and jokes. One example is the magazine spine, where the usual binary striping has been replaced with what appears to be a colour code carrying a message. Echoes of Peter Saville’s Blue Monday 12″ sleeve).  His passion was evident throughout his talk, and everyone I spoke to afterward had been inspired not only by the work but his rallying call for editorial design. There remains something satisfyingly appropriate about such future-facing content being delivered in the form of a tangible, printed monthly.

One senses this new issue is something of a watershed – where can Wired go from here? And indeed, where can Dadich?