Glamour has hired its first digital art director, a move that underscores its effort to reach the digital natives craved by the fashion brand and its advertisers.
Yvonne Lao will oversee product design across Web, mobile and social. She’ll also work with the sales team on ad placement. She recently had the same position at The Wall Street Journal Digital Network and has worked for brands like J.Crew and Stella McCartney.
While having an art director dedicated to the Web is uncommon at most print magazines, Glamour editor in chief Cindi Leive said it had become necessary.
“I think the days where you could be a sophisticated site and function without a key design person at the helm are over,” she said.
Later this year, Glamour.com plans to break off its all-important beauty channel as a standalone destination, à la New York magazine’s expansion of The Cut blog.
“The enthusiasm for beauty content is extreme among our readers,” Leive said.
The new channel will be home to Glamour’s popular Girls in the Beauty Department blog and digital-savvy writers like Simone Kitchens, who recently left the Huffington Post to become Glamour’s deputy beauty editor.
Glamour’s digital efforts haven’t gone unnoticed; it recently was nominated for National Magazine Awards for Magazine of the Year (recognizing success across all media platforms) and General Excellence in Digital Media (three of the other four nominees were digital natives). The brand was ranked No. 1 on L2's Digital IQ Index for Fashion & Beauty magazines.