Richard Turley

EO

Most people know Richard Turley as the creative director behind The Guardian, Bloomberg Businessweek, MTV, Interview, and the visual identity of Formula 1. They're all distinct institutions, each with its own language and way of communicating. Yet when I look across your work, I see continuity more than change. Have you always been working through the same problem?

RT

Truthfully, I’m actually about to change again, which you may not know. I’m leaving Interview and moving to Life magazine. Karlie Kloss acquired Life a couple of years ago, and that’s where I’m headed now. I’m still finishing one more issue at Interview, but the next chapter has already begun.

EO

What does it mean to leave Interview now?

RT

I think every magazine eventually needs to evolve. It’s funny because a few people have left recently, which probably looks coordinated from the outside, but it really wasn’t. We all arrived at those decisions independently. At a certain point you just recognize that you’ve been somewhere long enough and it’s time for something else.

EO

Editors specifically seem to have a particularly complicated relationship to change. A magazine can become your platform, your language. But once you’ve spent years inside one institution, it becomes difficult to imagine speaking differently or changing tone. Was that difficult for you?

RT

Honestly, I’ve never really thought of what I’ve done as pivots. They feel more like evolutions. I think that’s because of the conditions I’ve tried to create around my work. I’ve never wanted to define myself by a single publication. Maybe that goes back to something that happened in my early twenties. About two years into my career, I was working at a dance music magazine, Seven, in England when it suddenly collapsed. It simply ran out of money. Going through that kind of experience so early on in my career created something in me that never completely went away.

EO

I’ve been thinking a lot about subculture recently, particularly its disappearance and the way movements like rave culture have increasingly been absorbed into the mainstream as marketing aesthetics. I caught the tail end of it around 2009, when I was in high school in Los Angeles. It felt like the last real wave before electronic music fully crossed over into the mainstream.

Around that same time, fifteen-year-old Sasha Rodriguez died after attending Electric Daisy Carnival (EDC) at the Los Angeles Coliseum. I was there that weekend. We were the same age. It could just as easily have been any of us. The city responded by making future events 18 and over, and EDC ultimately left Los Angeles. Looking back, it felt like the end of one era and the beginning of another. It coincided with Coachella’s rapid ascent as a defining cultural institution, electronic music’s crossover into the mainstream, and the emergence of a much more commercial festival culture. At the time, though, EDC was simply another place for us to convene as teenagers. We weren’t going because we identified as ravers. We were drawn as much to the act of gathering as we were to the euphoria of it all.

You came of age at a moment when magazines were one of the primary ways those worlds—and culture itself—were documented and circulated. What did that landscape look like?

RT

Your cultural choices weren’t separate from who you were. They were who you were. You also have to understand England. It’s a country that’s always been desperate for the next thing. There are plenty of negative aspects to that, and some of it has probably dissipated since I left, but there was this enormous appetite for whatever was emerging next. You could walk around London—or really anywhere in the country—and people genuinely wanted to be part of whatever was coming next.

Culture moved differently because the media environment was different. The BBC still held everything together to a certain extent. Newspapers mattered. Legacy media had a much stronger grip on everyday life than it does now.

I’d always wanted to work in magazines. In the 1990s, magazines genuinely were how culture was disseminated. That's how ideas moved. The way you learned and experienced ideas about music, fashion, politics, and culture was through magazines. They weren’t simply documenting those worlds. They were participating in them.

EO

It’s interesting because today it almost feels like it’s become a form of code-switching again. While it may seem like people can move between different scenes much more fluidly, these identities are masked in this new way.

RT

Exactly, earlier on whenever you found a groove that was your people. Today you can move around that much more easily but I think it does require more “Cosplay.” Which is maybe a little dismissive a word, but people identity-shift in ways they couldn’t then and now have to?

EO

But it wasn’t even that for me. I would’ve never described myself as a raver either. It wasn’t an identity I was performing or concealing. We just increasingly found ourselves there. Looking back, I realize I was drawn as much to the act of convening as I was to the music itself. Every event occupied a different venue, a different theme, and a different community. They almost shared the interior logic of artist-run spaces—temporary, self-organized worlds that appeared for a night before disappearing again. At the time, though, it didn't feel like a subculture. It simply felt like where life was happening.

RT

That’s the difference. Back then, the music you listened to, the places you went, and the magazines you read weren’t separate from who you were. They didn't have to be.

EO

How did you actually find those magazines?

RT

Just at the newsagent. I grew up in England, so you could walk in and buy The Face, i-D, Dazed. Sometimes you’d have to search a little harder, but they weren’t impossible to find. Those were the magazines that held the cultural keys at the time. They were really in their ascendancy.

EO

So if Tina Brown belongs to an earlier generation, who were the people you were actually following?

RT

Jefferson Hack, without question. He came from a town not far from where I grew up, so there was already a sense of proximity there. Dazed began as this small magazine and just kept growing. More than anyone, Jefferson became a role model for me. But you also have to remember that this was a period when culture itself was in the ascendant. Photography was changing. Fashion was changing. Everything felt like it was opening up at once.

Eventually, some years later, Jefferson once told me that when Dazed first started there were really only two dominant kinds of photography: reportage and documentary photography. What Dazed did was push much harder toward invention. The Face had already begun documenting musicians, artists, and actors in a much cooler way than traditional magazines, but Dazed really pushed the visual language forward. It created space for photographers like Juergen Teller, Mert and Marcus, and so many others to experiment in ways that hadn’t really existed in culture before. That felt incredibly exciting.

EO

But what specifically did Dazed do? Because when I hear this now, it reminds me of the conversation we’re having across culture more broadly. It’s the same thing with museums. Museums used to show distinct artists; now they all seem to show the same artists. The same thing has happened in literature. Everything feels flattened. So what was it that made Dazed specifically Dazed?

RT

I think it was taste. It was the choices they made. All three magazines had a visual language and a point of view, but Dazed had a particular spirit. It wasn’t just communicating through words. It communicated through photography, typography, layout, pacing, and presentation. That’s the part that always interested me. Magazines weren’t simply places where stories were published. They were ways of seeing. You picked up Dazed and immediately felt yourself entering a particular culture. It felt slightly pirate-like. There was an excitement to it that was difficult to manufacture.

EO

Why do you think that generation has remained so influential?

RT

That’s one of the strange things. I remember talking to Babak Radboy about this years ago. We all assumed that generation would eventually move on, but in many ways they’re still the creative class. They’re still occupying that territory.

At the time, though, they genuinely represented something different. There was a different spirit, a different openness, and a different set of values. It aligned with what was happening politically in England. We’d come through Thatcher and that whole period, and then the mid-1990s brought Tony Blair. People criticize him now, and fairly enough, but living through it, it felt like this enormous breath of fresh air. Society suddenly felt organized around values that younger people recognized in themselves. Those magazines were ahead of that shift. The Face, i-D, and Dazed were all expressing a multicultural, outward-looking liberalism before it became commonplace. The same feeling existed in clubs, in ecstasy, and in nightlife. It felt like a much more open culture. I’m sure I’m papering over plenty of injustices, and I’m not saying it felt that way for everyone, but that was certainly my experience of it.

EO

I was in Paris recently and picked up The Return of the 90s. It’s this collection of essays about the decade—hip-hop, rave culture, fashion, magazines, film, television, the early internet—and the way all of those worlds were feeding into one another. It made me think about how culture circulated then, how ideas moved between and affected different scenes, and how so much of the truth of what we’re living with now seems to have taken shape during that period.

RT

That’s exactly where all of that comes from. The nineties were a great time. They were the beginning of another loop. During the nineties we looked back at the sixties and thought, “God, I wish I’d lived through that. The Beatles. Wasn’t it amazing?” Now people are doing exactly the same thing with the nineties. I think it’s about a thirty-year loop, maybe twenty-five. I don’t even know if it really exists anymore because phones disrupted so much of it, but there was definitely a cyclical quality.

The fact that the nineties are being mythologized now makes perfect sense. It’s roughly thirty years later. There's probably even something biological about it. People in their twenties have kids, and twenty-five or thirty years later those kids arrive with similar ideals. But when we were living through the nineties, we didn’t think we were living through some extraordinary period. It just felt like life.

EO

So you’re twenty in 1996. You're in Liverpool. Is music your entire world at that point?

RT

Yeah, yeah. Music really was everything. We were out constantly. Liverpool was one of the reasons I chose to go there. I walked into the art school and it had a bunch of computers. There weren’t many computers around then, so my decision was basically based on two things: the music culture in Liverpool and the fact that the school had a large supply of computers.

We were out and partied all the time. There was one enormous nightclub in Liverpool called Cream, which was completely era-defining. It was a real cultural force in that part of England.

But Liverpool itself was just as important. People always talk about the Beatles, and obviously that’s part of the story, but Liverpool had always been this incredible cultural melting pot. Like Bristol, it was one of the first genuinely multicultural cities in England because of the port. People were constantly arriving from Ireland and elsewhere, and that collision of cultures generated new ideas. Diversity wasn’t an abstract concept there. It was built into the fabric of the city itself.

One example I always think about is the Jamaican sound systems that arrived in Britain after the Second World War with the Windrush generation. Huge sound systems were set up in places like Notting Hill, and suddenly white punk kids were hanging around with Jamaican communities. Out of that came an entirely new cultural language. It informed punk, fashion, and music. Those collisions produced something neither culture would’ve arrived at on its own. You either believe in multiculturalism or you don’t, but for me it’s always been a net positive because that’s where new ideas come from. Liverpool had that built into its history for hundreds of years.

EO

When you’re at university, did you already understand that your interests could become a career? That magazines or design might actually become your life?

RT

That’s what the university magazine taught me. Design only comes alive when somebody encounters it. You can make something beautiful in school, but until it’s read, looked at, or used by someone else, you don’t really know what it is. Communication design needs an audience. We realized we could actually mess with people. We’d criticize the university, make fun of people, and push things much further than anyone expected. We ended up getting banned from the student union building because of some of the things we published. I remember thinking, I like this. There was something exhilarating about realizing that a printed object could actually have consequences.

EO

How did that lead you to the competition?

RT

The Guardian ran a national student journalism competition every year, and pretty much every university in the UK entered it. It was mostly geared toward writers and editors, but there was a design category as well. In our final year, Jimmy and I took over the student magazine. We completely transformed it, turning it into this strange design project, and knew that if we won the competition the prize was a two-week internship at The Guardian.

We graduated in June 1997, but the competition wasn’t judged until the following April. So I went back to my hometown and spent eight or nine months working in a print shop while we waited to hear the results. At the time it felt unbelievably monotonous. I remember thinking, This is so far removed from what I actually want to be doing. Looking back, though, it was communication in its purest form. Nobody cared about the typography or the design. They just wanted to know how much the sandwiches cost.

That was also when I met my wife, so there was a reason I was there beyond simply waiting for the next thing. But I was all in on that competition. I knew that if we didn't win, I didn't really have a Plan B. That felt very real to me.

When we finally found out we’d won, the prize was a two-week internship at The Guardian for both of us. We started at the beginning of the summer, and because so many people were on holiday, I think I made a good enough impression that they just kept extending me. It became, “Terry’s on holiday. Just throw Richard on it.” I started in the in-house marketing department, which was actually really good. I still work closely with one of the people I met there. Eventually they gave me a job.

I was there for about a year, maybe eighteen months. Then I heard about a dance music magazine that needed an art director, so I left for two or three years. It collapsed, and then I went back to The Guardian.

EO

What did that first job at The Guardian teach you?

RT

The marketing department taught me how a studio actually works. I learned how work comes in, how projects move through an organization, and how ideas become finished pieces.

EO

And then you leave.

RT

Yeah. I went to Seven, a small dance music magazine. At that point I was still completely obsessed with Dazed, The Face, and i-D. Truthfully, what I was trying to do was make my own version of those magazines. That was the ambition. I was looking at them constantly and trying to understand why they worked.

It was my first experience of making something independently. I learned a tremendous amount, met a lot of good people, and had a lot of freedom creatively. Then the magazine folded.

EO

What did that feel like?

RT

At first it felt exciting because I finally had control. Then it disappeared. I’d just gotten married, and suddenly I had real responsibilities. Looking back, I’d failed at plenty of things before then, but this was the first time I experienced something collapsing that I’d genuinely believed in. It created this enormous panic. I remember thinking, I’m never going to get another job. What am I doing? I wish I could go back now and tell myself not to panic, but at the time it felt like everything had fallen apart.

EO

So how do you find your way back?

RT

I was interviewing everywhere, just trying to get a job. By then I’d been in London for three or four years. I’d done my first stint at The Guardian, then the music magazine, and somehow I found my way back—but this time to the newspaper rather than the marketing department. Looking back, I think luck plays an enormous part in everybody’s career.

EO

Truly. It’s giving Sliding Doors.

RT

I don’t even think there was a formal job. I reached out to some of the people I knew at The Guardian and asked if I could come in and show them my work. That’s how I ended up meeting Mark Porter.

EO

What was different the second time?

RT

I was taking the ideas the editorial department was developing and giving them form—putting images to them, designing the pages. It was The Guardian newspaper itself this time, not the marketing department. The internet was only just beginning to arrive. Not long after I started they decided to redesign the newspaper, moving from the broadsheet format to something much more manageable, and that project was given to Mark Porter. He pulled me into it. For the next two years, we essentially sat in a room together figuring out how to build a new newspaper.

EO

What did redesigning the Guardian actually mean? You weren’t just changing how it looked. You were asking fundamental questions about its form, format, and way of communication.

RT

It was huge. Again, looking back, it was an enormous project. The Guardian was about a hundred years old, and we were changing the way people experienced it. More importantly for me, though, it meant sitting in a room for two years with Mark Porter and all of the senior editors, watching them think. Every important person at the Guardian came through that room. That kind of exposure is invaluable. You spend enough time around people operating at that level, and it inevitably rubs off on you.

EO

How did being around that level of thinking change you?

RT

I don’t know if it changed me editorially in any direct sense because I was so deep in the weeds. I wasn’t making those decisions. I was just there, watching. But I think there’s something incredibly valuable about being in close proximity to highly intelligent, ambitious people. That, more than anything, is what stayed with me.

On a practical level, I learned my trade. I learned how to set type. I met Christian Schwartz, who became one of my best friends. He was designing the typeface for the redesign, so I was exposed to that whole process through him. But beyond that, I became a real advocate for apprenticeship. I still think graphic design, and a lot of these commercial creative jobs, are much better learned by sitting next to somebody who’s genuinely good at what they do. University is useful, but there’s another way of thinking about it and approaching learning craft. You situate yourself beside someone, absorb how they think, and eventually you’re released on your own.

It’s funny because this is where I always end up thinking about nepotism. People usually assume the advantage is simply access to successful people. I actually think it’s almost the opposite. The real advantage is seeing those people when they’re not functioning at their best. You see them under pressure. You see them overwhelmed. You see them making mistakes. It humanizes them. We have a tendency to put successful people on pedestals and imagine everything comes easily to them. But when you’re actually around them, you realize they’re just people. They struggle. They doubt themselves. They get things wrong. That normalizes success in a way that’s incredibly powerful and makes it manageable as an aspiration.

EO

I think you're right. They understand how things actually get made because they're hearing it from the people who made them. The average person only ever encounters the finished work. They're not privy to the conditions that shape it: the months where nothing seems to move, the false starts, the delays, the conversations that quietly redirect a project before anyone ever sees it. Once you understand those conditions, success stops feeling mythical. It becomes something that anyone can build.

RT

Exactly. And that’s not something you learn overnight. By the time all of that happened, I’d been at The Guardian for maybe six years altogether. I started out assisting Mark Porter on general projects, then spent two years with him redesigning the newspaper.

The redesign was a success. If you look at The Guardian today, you can still see the foundations of what we built. It was considered the design newspaper in England, so it was a significant moment for the publication. It wasn’t really an evolution. It was a complete change. But the thing I took away wasn’t the redesign itself. It was the fact that I spent two years being mentored by this complete nerd.

EO

And that led to the daily magazine.

RT

Yeah. Out of that I was given G2, the Guardian’s daily magazine. It came out five days a week with the newspaper. It wasn’t the newspaper itself. It was a small news magazine that sat inside it, almost like a condensed magazine rather than a newspaper section. Suddenly I was making a magazine every day. I had the kind of creative control I’d briefly had at the music magazine, except now I was doing it continuously. I was art directing, commissioning, making decisions, and shipping something every single day. More than anything, it taught me to think instinctively. You simply don’t have time to overthink when you’re producing a magazine every twenty-four hours.

EO

Is this where you started getting restless?

RT

Yeah. I was getting restless. I had a kid by then. I started looking at Time magazine, and it’s funny because so much of my career is really based on this one PDF I sent when I was just a bit gnarly and wanted a pay raise.

At that point I wasn’t thinking about America. That would’ve been a job in England. I’d formally applied for a position at Time’s London bureau. Because it was Time, there was a global creative director who had to approve every hire in the design department. I never met Arthur Hochstein. I just applied like anybody else. The creative director in London sent my portfolio to Arthur for approval. At the time, I assumed he was just another editor or creative director at Time. I had no idea any of this had happened until the whole Businessweek story emerged.

My PDF ended up sitting on Arthur’s desktop for a couple of years. By then he’d either left Time or was in the middle of leaving. When Bloomberg bought Businessweek, one of his former colleagues asked him who should become the magazine’s new creative director. Arthur apparently said, “I don’t really know who this person is, but I’ve had this PDF sitting on my desktop for about two years. Maybe you should talk to him.” I didn't learn any of that until I was already interviewing for the job.

EO

So you don’t even know Businessweek is happening yet.

RT

My PDF ended up sitting on Arthur's desktop for a couple of years. By that point he'd either left Time or was in the middle of leaving. When Bloomberg bought Businessweek, one of his former colleagues asked him who should become the magazine’s new creative director. Arthur apparently said, “I don’t really know who this person is, but I’ve had this PDF sitting on my desktop for about two years. Maybe you should talk to him.” I didn't learn any of that until I was already interviewing for the job.

It all happened completely out of the blue. I think it was just an email. Arthur probably still had my email from The Guardian, or it was easy enough to figure out. Bloomberg had bought Businessweek, and a couple of former Time people had been brought in to hire the editor and the creative director. One of those people reached out to Arthur, and that's how my name came up.

Honestly, I don’t remember very much about the beginning of it. I just remember there being this conversation around, “Do you want to redesign Businessweek?” I thought, I’ll give it a go. It felt like a real long shot. I didn’t really think I was going to get it.

EO

So Formula 1 comes to you. What was the brief?

RT

They thought what they needed was a new logo. We were kind of like, “Okay, you need a new logo—but that’s actually just the beginning of what you need.” You need a way of talking. You need a voice. You need a framework. The logo was really the smallest part of the problem.

EO

So what did you actually do?

RT

It was an extremely condensed, hyper-pressurized creative sprint over one summer—the summer of 2017. That was really my first experience of branding. Essentially, I just applied magazine principles to it. It wasn’t branding in the traditional sense. It was about voice. It was about creating a system that could express itself consistently.

EO

So in a way you’re branding a magazine.

RT

Exactly. There are direct commonalities. Whether it’s a magazine or Formula 1, you’re really building a framework. The medium changes, but the process doesn’t. You’re trying to establish a way of communicating that can extend across everything else.

EO

From the outside, though, Formula 1 and Interview feel like completely different projects and spaces.

RT

They do if you think about the subjects. For me, they're remarkably similar. Whether the strategy is codified in a formal document or just discussed over coffee, the process is basically the same. You begin with a strategic insight, you develop a point of view, and then you work through an iterative process until that thinking becomes a visual system. That’s true whether you’re working on Formula 1, Interview, or a magazine.

EO

So where does your attention go after Formula 1?

RT

The Formula 1 project hadn’t quite ended, but most of it had. I’d spent the summer of 2017 in London working on it before coming back to New York. One day I walked into a magazine store and helped out on a friend’s newspaper. I realized how much I’d missed making magazines. I remember thinking, I just want something for me. It felt like slipping into a silky pair of pajamas. Suddenly I wasn’t having to reinvent everything. I wasn’t pretending I knew how to do something completely new. I was back in a language I already understood.

EO

So that’s when Civilization starts to come into focus.

RT

Yes, that’s when the vision for Civilization started to come more into focus. That got Thom Bettridge’s attention. Thom and I already knew each other, and Lucas and I had met at MTV. When I was trying to figure out partners for Civilization, Lucas was really the only person who immediately wanted to get involved. He’s a lovely guy. Then, because Civilization caught Thom’s attention, things started moving from there and picked up quickly.

Mel Ottenberg had brought Thom in, and Thom was already there as the senior editor. Thom’s one of the most ambitious people I’ve ever met. He’s constantly looking for the next thing. Eventually I was approached to become the design director of Interview, essentially stepping into the role Fabian Baron had occupied.

EO

But you’re still at Wieden.

RT

That came toward the end of my time at Wieden, and because I was so underutilized there—and because I tend to work a lot—I was able to moonlight on Interview while I was still at the agency. When I came to Interview, it wasn’t about putting my stamp on the magazine. It was about figuring out what it already was and helping it become a clearer version of itself.

Well, then COVID happened. I got let go from Wieden in 2020. I’d probably been there about four years. Looking back, I’d been waiting for the axe to fall anyway. Formula 1 happened in the first couple of years, and after that I knew it wasn’t really working. I knew I didn’t particularly enjoy working there. But I was getting paid very well. Wieden had offices all over the world, and they were flying me constantly—to London, Tokyo, São Paulo, India, China, all over Europe. I wasn’t about to fuck that up. It was an extraordinary experience. I knew it was slow to turn the wheel, but I also knew it probably wasn’t where I was going to stay forever.

EO

Do you think about audience?

RT

Not really. If I'm happy, usually other people are happy. I think I know when something's good and when something isn't.

EO

Maybe that’s the wrong way to ask it. What did your twenties teach you? Then your thirties. Then your forties. And now, standing on the eve of your fiftieth birthday, what do you think your fifties look like?

RT

Maybe my twenties were really about learning the craft. My thirties were when I learned who I was. Maybe that was the decade when I understood what I could contribute, why my perspective was a little different.

My forties have probably been my least favorite decade because of COVID, because of uncertainty, because everything felt unstable. More than anything, they taught me how to live with uncertainty. How to exist without a monthly paycheck. How to trust that things would work out.

EO

So the uncertainty isn’t something you’re trying to escape anymore.

RT

No. As for my fifties, I think I’ve finally become comfortable with it. I'm okay not having a regular paycheck. I’m okay being self-supporting. I have an identity now that exists outside of a single company, a single project, or a single brand.

EO

You’ve gained your own voice.

RT

Yeah. That’s a good way of putting it. I’ve gained my own voice.

There’s that proverb: “The tree that bends with the wind does not break.” I think that’s probably right. You have to bend. Otherwise, you break.

At twenty, you can’t possibly imagine who you’ll be at fifty. The things that happen to you stay with you, but they carry you somewhere you never could have predicted. That’s just life.