IQ,UA: Designing the Future of a Storied Magazine
The Atlantic’s VP of Product Design Jim Quindlen lets the writing take center stage.
I’m Chris, head of creative and story here at Artemis Ward. Every month I bring IQ, UA to The So What, where I chat with somebody who has a finger on the pulse of a moment unfolding in front of us — and together, in five questions + five answers, we try to understand what that moment really means.
When Jim Quindlen joined The Atlantic as a director of product design in October 2018, the storied magazine was just weeks away from celebrating its 161st birthday. In the roughly 1,912 issues published between its founding in November 1857 and Jim’s arrival, the magazine had been home to articles and stories written by an astonishingly consequential list of authors: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Langston Hughes, T.S. Eliot, Truman Capote, Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Annie Dillard, Roxanne Gay, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and — do I have to stop? The magazine had published abolitionists, transcendentalists, modernists, civil rights leaders, Cold War thinkers, contemporary policy writers, and celebrated fiction writers. Ultimately, the magazine had anchored itself at the epicenter of American thinking.
Given this legacy, it’s no wonder that “the people involved in sculpting the way our world works are reading The Atlantic,” as Jim told me. In the nearly eight years since he joined the publication, he’s wielded the tools of product design to preserve this legacy while simultaneously amplifying the latest articles and inviting new generations of readers into the fold. This means that on any given day you may find Jim and his team evolving the magazine’s website, enhancing its mobile app, working with the editorial team to create interactive experiences for featured stories, or hammering out the user-experience for the magazine’s growing suite of games.
I recently caught up with Jim — who’s now The Atlantic’s vice president of product design — to get a glimpse into how one of the oldest continuously published magazines in America stays at the heart of our national conversation.
The Atlantic has been at the heart of American intellectual and cultural dialogue for 169 years now. That’s a really long legacy. How does working for a brand with this sort of history influence and shape the way that you approach product design?
There’s a lot of burden there, an obligation to continue that legacy. But when you think about product design, a lot of it has come out of the tech world, a newer environment that’s all about moving fast and breaking things and experimenting. I don’t want to suggest that we don’t do that, but I think we’re very cautious about what we put out into the world, and we want to make sure that it reflects an ethos of journalism that is sort of sacred.
Because of that, we’re far less likely to chase trends or fads or jump into unproven technologies just for the sake of it. We rarely do anything frivolous. We’re much more focused on the connection between journalism and our readers. What is the shortest path and the most effective path that amplifies our core brand values? Who are we as an organization? These are the questions we ask. In that way, we’re brutally focused — always reminding ourselves that the important thing here is the journalism. The important thing here is the story. We’re always trying to convey that sort of focus and simplicity. You’re not going to The Atlantic to find breaking news. You’re going there to get a sense of what things mean. How is this relevant to society in general? Or how is it connected to other people and ideas? So, as product designers, we try to get out of the way. We don’t add bells and whistles for the sake of adding bells and whistles. I don’t want to say our approach is minimalism, but I would call it prioritization.
The word “journalism” is obviously at the heart of everything The Atlantic does. But you didn’t come from a journalism background before you landed at The Atlantic. You spent most of your career on the agency side, at places like APCO and Ogilvy, with titles like creative director and art director and designer. How do you bring that experience to bear in this role, which is obviously very focused on journalism?
I know this may sound trite, but in all of my roles it really is about communication and storytelling. But what the agency world really did is teach me how to parachute into an active situation. When you’re parachuting in, you have to be ready to learn something completely new that day. You’ve got to read a brief, you’ve got to research the company, you’ve got to make connections quickly — and then be ready to execute on that. So, I think one difference I see between folks who have that agency background versus folks who’ve worked in house somewhere for a long time is that ability to shift, to change directions, to receive feedback and input, and shift again. I think that agility, that sort of responsiveness, is a piece of the agency world that I brought with me to The Atlantic.
And it’s definitely been an asset, because change is always happening. The vehicles and experiences we need to create to deliver journalism changes as our business strategy shifts, our subscription strategy, our traffic, our brand perception — all of that. So, you need to have agility to be able to move from moment to moment. You can’t just fall in love with your first approach or your first strategy. If it’s not working, cut it off and move on to the next thing. You have to be resilient, in a way. That’s a hard thing to teach, but it’s something you learn quickly in the agency world.
You talk about building vehicles to deliver journalism to audiences, and doing that in a way that leans into simplicity and away from frivolity. I assume that the best product design — like the best design in general — grows out of a genuine understanding of who your audiences are, what their behaviors are, what motivates them. To that end, how do you think about using the principles of design to streamline the delivery of complex narratives and complex information in ways that modern day audiences are more likely to notice and consume?
It’s a really interesting question — especially when working for a brand like The Atlantic, because journalists are not focused on marketing, they’re not writing stories for target audiences, they’re not changing their editorial approach based on what they think people will like. Which is refreshing! The editorial team has a mission based on writing stories that they think are important. And their work has clearly made a huge impact on our country and our ability to hold power to account and to investigate really important issues.
But that’s also where the challenge comes in, because we, as designers, are charged with using all of the tools at our disposal to help the journalism attract readers. How do we show people that this is incredible content and incredible stuff that they should be interested in? It’s our job as designers to facilitate that. And we do that by trying to make our product experience seamless — to get out of the way of users and just empower them to do the types of things they want to do. My perspective as a former agency person is that we have all these moments to establish an image of who The Atlantic is in the minds of people who are encountering our stories. So every little element — all of our subtle design choices — have to communicate to them that this is a magazine based on words and ideas, and we’re giving you the space to focus on them. We’re not cramming stuff in. This isn’t a feed. You should be giving this content your attention and thinking about it.
Given your charge of boosting The Atlantic’s journalism, I’m assuming there’s back and forth between your team and the writers. How much collaboration is there between you and the people who are actually writing and editing the articles?
In a broad generalization, I’d say there are two ways we collaborate across teams. First is on the website, which is the product that houses most of our stories. We collaborate mostly with editors but also sometimes writers on updates to system-wide elements of the site.
And then there are instances where the editorial team decides they want to do something bespoke. At those times, we collaborate very closely with the editorial team and the editorial art team to bring these enhanced storytelling pieces to life. This could mean a different bespoke design, a different typography, potentially, or some interactive elements. We’ll often preview elements in Figma and in prototypes with the writers, then they’ll give us input, and we iterate like that. We always want to work very closely with the writers to make sure what we’re doing is following their story.
Something I really admire about The Atlantic is that you can feel this sort of allegiance to the traditions and the standards of great journalism. But it also has a modern feel to it that seems like it’s always opening the door to new audiences. With that in mind, what are ways that The Atlantic is pushing — and will be pushing — its product design in order to keep itself at the center of American cultural conversations in a modern, relevant way?
One of our fundamental ambitions is staying relevant to younger audiences in particular. To achieve this, we don’t need to change anything about what The Atlantic does. We just need to communicate the value of what we do to audiences so they understand what exactly that value is. There’s no basis for this theory, but I have a sense that everybody hits an age when they’re ready to become an Atlantic reader. Like, they hit a phase of life where their curiosity is piqued, where they’re starting to care a little bit more about politics and understand how things work, and they’re starting to see the world and are curious about the world. From a strategic perspective, I’m always trying to figure out: what is that moment? And how do we get in front of people when they’re ready for us?
In terms of how we keep our products relevant, there’s a tension. We will not be altering the journalism — this is the lifeblood and the core element of what we do. These stories are ultimately what we’re all here for. So, we just want to bring people into The Atlantic ecosystem through smart products. Given the agentic nature of the web, what are the properties that we own versus properties [like social media] that are ultimately controlled by other forces? The mobile application, for instance, is something we own, so how do we make that a premium Atlantic experience? How can we use that as a vehicle to really connect with our readers in a different way than they would get from a browser or from Apple News or whatever.
We’re also looking at how we do games in an Atlantic way. We don’t want to become frivolous and make Fruit Ninja games that don’t really connect to our brand. But there are some interesting things we can do that reflect The Atlanticethos of curiosity and intellectual thought. So, we’re working on a suite of games — we have five or six out now — and we’re going to continue to work on those as ways to draw people in. The other area I’m really interested in is audio and how to make that the best and most efficient it can be. There are a lot of folks who really value consuming journalism in that way. So, let’s make it appealing to them.
As I said, we’re trying to connect with younger audiences, so we recently made subscriptions free to high schoolers. We think that’s a great moment for folks to be introduced to The Atlantic — when they’re already studying American history or civics. That’s not product design, but it is a great way to stay relevant and to rope in younger people.
Given everything we just kind of talked about, what would you say is the hallmark of Atlantic product design? What’s the special DNA there?
I think it’s intentionality — that sort of restraint and simplicity. It’s great when we do interviews with users and they say: Oh, I love The Atlantic. It’s so refreshing and just so clean and open. That’s exactly what we want to hear.
🗞️ Keep up with Jim on LinkedIn — and try out some of those games at The Atlantic.
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