Wired executive creative director Billy Sorrentino doesn’t call his title “a magazine” – instead, he calls it an experience.
Speaking at ADMA’s Creative Fuel event today in Sydney, Sorrentino, said when he joined Wired in 2013 from Condé Nast, he completely overhauled the magazine, using good design as the base.
When he started at the publication it – like many other magazines in the landscape – was at “a crossroads.” In 1993 when Wired started it was a bible for the tech world. But as technology became more mainstream, it was struggling to keep its place in an increasingly fragmented media landscape.
“This was a big brand, this was an important brand and most importantly it was at a crossroads; it was in a hard place,” Sorrentino said.
“So how do we find our voice? How do we matter? That meant it was time to redesign wired. And not necessarily what we were covering or how we were covering it but how we were going to re-situate ourselves, and stop thinking about ourselves as a magazine.”
Instead Sorrentino focused on creating an “experience” with the brand at the centre.
He said most publishing works in a triangle structure, with a magazine at the top of the pyramid, digital below it, and social and events at the very bottom crafted with “whatever assets you have left.”
Instead Wired is now run as a “circular” cohesive brand where all touchpoints are seen as an outlet for storytelling.
Physically, Sorrentino said bringing this type of storytelling to life meant a redesign of the entire office, having print and web designers sitting side by side and eventually removing the prefix altogether from their titles.
It also involved a redefinition of what design means as a concept which it condensed into the catchphrase “design is experience not image.”
“The point isn’t that it's design making things beautiful, it makes them work and that’s paramount to how we look at Wired. It's creative decision making,” Sorrentino said.
“So we use that as kind of the cardinal principal of how Wired looks at design: how Wired grows from something that is lost in the mix of competitors to something that is hopefully worthwhile to our readers.”
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