Fishbowl Five With Wired Editor-in-Chief Scott Dadich
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Scott Dadich / Photo: Joe Pugliese
If anyone knows how to revamp a digital magazine with substance and style and with an eye on innovation, it’s Scott Dadich. Wired’s editor-in-chief, who served as the pub’s award-winning creative director from 2006 to 2010, led the development of Wired’s trendsetting iPad app, launched just a month after the device itself was introduced. Within a month, downloads of the app reached nearly 100,000. It’s no wonder he was subsequently bumped up to vice president of editorial platforms and design for Condé Nast, a tenure during which he made more app magic, including with The New Yorker’s tablet edition (it debuted at #4 on the iTunes Top Grossing apps list in 2011).
Since returning to Wired in November 2012, Dadich’s top priorities have included a relaunch of Wired.com. In his editor’s note, Dadich stressed the importance of the mobile experience:
This new Wired is a more comfortable browsing and reading experience, its stories primed for sharing with friends and colleagues. But none of that razzle-dazzle matters if you can’t get our pages to load. So we made a significant investment in decluttering and streamlining our code.
Here, Dadich answers five questions on the redesign and what’s next for the print mag:
FBNY: The new site looks great! What are the key improvements?
Dadich: This is a total reimagining and total relaunch of the site. It’s new from a technological standpoint, it’s new from a design standpoint, from an editorial standpoint. We’ve reclassified some of the site taxonomy and we really built the whole thing from scratch over the course of the past two years. It’s got brand new APIs that are going to let us share our content across the full scope of the Web. But it’s also very much about the storytelling itself, the quality of the writing, the layouts, the typographic fidelity, the new responsive layout that’s designed to look great on your smartphone. We actually designed it with the smartphone in mind first and then made sure it looked great on desktops and laptops as well.
[For the mobile design] it’s about a terrific reading experience. Wired has some bespoke typefaces we’ve built over the past few years. So making sure it was really clean, and open, and readable, was a big part of it, but the other side is speed and performance. We stripped out about half of the server calls that our pages were making. In some cases that means the actual page load time is twice as fast, optimized for mobile browsing, and making sure that it’s a quick and streamlined experience.FBNY: As someone who led the digital magazine development for Condé Nast, what are your thoughts on the importance of app development? Is this still as vital for Wired — and magazines in general — as it was in the past?
Dadich: A great number of our readers of the monthly editions still engage with us on iPads and other tablets. The app ecosystem is certainly important for us. However, the Web, in terms of scale, and the ability for us to deliver our stories across any browser, across any device is a bit more important for us these days. That’s not to say that apps have gone away. In fact with the relaunch we’ve actually built in a new number of APIs that are going to make it easier for us to adapt to the changing dynamics of app ecosystems and of mobile operating systems. As new platforms emerge, as new technologies emerge, we’re going to be able to adapt and meet those readers on whatever device they’re going to choose.
FBNY: Is a redesign of the print magazine next?
Dadich: We actually are going to be debuting a new front-of-the-book section in the April edition. The goal was to optimize the storytelling platform for the mix of subject matter we wanted to cover. Every day on the site, across science and design and business and security and technology, we publish a host of stories and some of those have appeared in the magazine, some of them will appear in the magazine, but what we try to do is optimize the right stories for the right platform, at the right shape, and editing, and art, and headline treatments. The new front of book for the magazine is structured with that in mind. It’s about great long-form reads, really compelling packaging exercises. Wired has always been great at infographics and visual design, so we will tailor the experience based on the needs of the medium. In this case, print wants a slightly different thing than the website wants, but all the editors and designers are engaged on working across the platforms currently.
FBNY: You’ve had some high-profile guest editors of the magazine, such as Christopher Nolan. Any plans to continue this?
Dadich: We are looking right now. Part of my job is to be out and about and meet with people. I’ve had a number of interesting conversations with a couple of folks who would be really exciting guest editors. We haven’t settled on who will be the next guest editor, but I continue to hear from people about guest-edited issues that we’ve published in the past. The Chris Nolan issues was one of my favorites, but I have loved issues like the Jim Cameron issue, the J.J. Abrams issue, so we’re thinking about what that’s going to mean — the Bill Gates issue even more recently. It was cool to see Chris and his team rewarded with the Oscar for best visual effects, which we got to tell the inside story of how those guys created the effects for Interstellar.
FBNY: Lastly, what are the elements of a phenomenal magazine cover? You had a pretty awesome one for your first sex issue.
Dadich: I’m lucky that I can call [award-winning art director] George Lois a friend of mine and a mentor. He has coached me over the course of my career on the important components of a great cover. I think for me that ends up being a mix of a powerful idea packaged in a beautiful, or compelling, or provocative piece of graphic design, and tapping into a national conversation, igniting further conversation. We think about that from the standpoint of what the magazine needs to do, what it’s obligated to do, in context of looking at the scope of a year, and the scope of the seasons, and the scope of the news cycles. It’s a delicate balance between all of those different factors, but we try to, on one hand, provoke and enlighten, and on the other, create a package that someone is proud to have on their coffee table.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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