Deez Interviews: Meet an event designer translating journalism for IRL

Happy Friday, Deezers! Today's interview is with my girl Gabriela Riccardi, who's here to dish on the glam & not so glam parts of putting the likes of John Kerry & co. on the stage.

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The interviewee: Gabriela Riccard (who you can follow @_griccardi!)

The job: Events designer with AtlanticLIVE, The Atlantic's events department

The hustle: We think of our work as the live platform for The Atlantic's journalism — taking the magazine's editorial ambition and bringing it into a room. We host more than a hundred Atlantic-produced festivals, summits, and forums around the country annually. Along with two other designers, I'm responsible for visually branding them all.

So much of your job is planning around and working around huge, mega-watt talent, yeah? What's that like?

I've usually started designing before I know who's been booked to speak! My process is pretty similar at the outset, whether it's a rural Pennsylvanian dairy farmer or John Kerry that's going to sit on my stage. A lot of my job involves envisioning ways to transform our spaces: how to build a set that reflects the program, how to make the room comfortable and inviting for our audiences, how to extend the experiences and the creative beyond the four walls of the program.

Last year, I headed up the design for a two-day summit on innovation out in Chicago. Transformation was a strong undercurrent to the program, which I wanted to emphasize onstage. We built a theater-sized set made up of LED screens, and I created custom images and videos that switched from session to session; in effect, we had a set that changed and evolved through the days. Beyond the theater, there were four more stories of the venue to fill — a lot of fun opportunities to make things like custom banners and flags, floor-to-ceiling window designs, and tech-y exhibit spaces.

Events are huge for any publisher rn as a way to make the $$$. So for anyone interested in getting into this space, what advice would you give them?

Let me just mix a lotta metaphors here. On the ground, events can feel like a sprinted marathon. You're firing on all cylinders. The calendar stops for nobody, even if the signs you had shipped were lost by the post office, your big speaker's flight's been delayed this morning, none of the microphones are working, and guests have started showing up TWO HOURS EARLY and would really like to know when the coffee will be out, please. The key is a rapid-response and will-do attitude about pitching in, no matter your job. No one's title is "staff 5 am breakfast coordinator," but we've all done it, from the executive director to me.

Any personal fan-woman moments to share?

ARE THERE. I really had to work at keeping my cool when I watched Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie from the wings of last year's Washington Ideas Forum. I picked up her writing just before seeing her speak and haven't quit it since. She read a passage from Americanah during this interview — it was totally dazzling.

And one other woman, also a writer, has made me melt, too: Margot Lee Shetterly, who wrote the Hidden Figures book, joined the audience after she spoke at that program on innovation I designed. She found me and a few teammates at the end of the day just to tell us how much she enjoyed being there! Swoon.

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So that’s a little look inside live events! TBH it sounds stressful AF, but this is coming from a chick who hardcore bungled her stint on Prom Committee. As always, if you’re interested in being profiled, hit me up! All subjects may remain anonymous if they wanna, because we aren’t snitches here at Deez.

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