Design Nation 2022: The Design In Concept with Ziad Foty

GW (Business Today): Thank you so much for joining me today. Just to begin, could you provide a brief background about your professional [experiences] prior to founding Design in DC, since I also know that you're actually a professor as well?

Ziad Foty (ZF): My name is Ziad Foty. I'm the CEO and Co-Founder of Design in DC. It’s been a fun journey getting to where I am. Before being CEO and founder, I've been a professor of film, film theory, history, and also production. I taught universities all across the DC area. I'm a Howard alum and did my MFA there. I taught at Howard, taught at Catholic University, and taught at George Mason University. I have a kind of a dual focus; I was able to teach Film History film theory. I did actually even taught a course on Global Horror Cinema and wrote a book with another professor Samirah Alkassim at George Mason University. It was a course book for students to examine a horror film within a global context and how, essentially, horror film can be a really good way to talk about the repressed emotions that lie laden within a given society. So we explore Indian horror, we explore Arab horror cinema, some of the more traditional ones like Japanese, and German neorealism horror. So that was really fun. I kind of come from these dual experiences: very academic background in some ways. I went to Trinity College, Dublin,  and did some PhD work in Montreal. But in another sense, I have a very extensive background in film production working in the production world, and I've taught both.

And that's what led me to founding Design in DC. My partner, Rob, and I, met in Canada. We were actually going to school at Concordia University. He really came out of the web design, digital agency world, having worked for some pretty big agencies, both in Canada and North America, and always wanted to start his own thing. I wasn't a coder or web designer, but  I always thought that the web design experience wasn't interactive enough. It didn't have a very compelling storytelling dynamic to it, so I really wanted websites to really have compelling visuals. So I want us to bring in the animation, bringing the film component, bring in photography. And that's been a really nice partnership because so many of these web design clients need all those other kinds of digital assets — and it's what brings their website to life. So that's how I started Design in DC with with Rob. We've been going on five years now, and it's been steadily growing.

BT: It's also really interesting to hear how you're able to leverage one side of like your background and film in your work in design. And something actually that interested me: I'm a DC area native and grew up in Northern Virginia, so George Mason is very dear to me. And so I'm curious, Design in DC’s mission statement mentions disrupting the DC creative model and bringing a fresh approach to human centered design. So in your work in that region, are there any unique aspects of working with like companies that you feel like you wouldn't have really gotten in another geographical region? Or is your work less region focused?

ZF: I can let you in on our kind of bigger plan for what we want Design in DC to be, even though we're still in the legal paperwork right now, if you will. The concept of “design in” is very important to us; we really want our designers and our workforce to very much understand the local market, which is why we tried to employ a lot of DC based people that understand the intricacies, the ins and outs of how DC works, but also can bring a fresh approach to DC. So for us, DC was a very kind of government, stuffy-suits town. And if you compare it to New York, for example, New York has that fashion feel — a center of fashion, a center of art. DC feels much more government oriented. We've worked with the World Bank, we've worked with companies like Leidos. For us, they always are turning to us because we are being disruptive in our approach. And we're not just giving you the cookie cutter website that every government agency has so and then for us, I truly believe in the clash of ideas as a way to create progress. And I was actually talking about that at Design Nation: this idea of dialectics and how the clash of ideas creates progress, which is why, for example, we can never, in my opinion, arrive at a post racial society. We always have to be operating on this continuum where we're clashing with different ideas. 

I even talked about the idea of having people with radically different political ideas in the same room and how that is good to creating change, because when whenever one is isolated, it's much more difficult to see the other person's perspective. I don't mean it in this very happy, PC way because that can also be a way to be very stagnant. It has to be a direct clash and a clash in a productive and meaningful way. But all that to say, that's kind of how we approach design. It's all through conversations with the client. We do a lot of workshops in the early phase, before we even get to the actual, high-fidelity mock ups where we're really trying to push the client both from a content and a design perspective. “Can we combine these two sections? Why do you have two sections that kind of are saying the same thing?” We're really trying to think of user journey, user experience, and then how does the design work with that. If we're trying to engage as a certain demographic. what do they like and how is the design cater to them? Speaking of which, I really liked the way the Design Nation website comes off; it’s simple, it's bold, and it just kind of brings you in. The larger idea of Design In is to create this Design In brand where we're having many different kinds of companies all across the nation, and potentially across the world, that that cater to the local market and the idea of Designing In physically and more conceptually. So that's where we're going. We're about to launch our design in New York brand and have plans for other subsidiaries across across the nation.

“The larger idea of Design In is to create this Design In brand where we’re having many different kinds of companies all across the nation, and potentially across the world, that that cater to the local market ”

BT: Wow, that's super exciting to hear. And I really like this concept of “design in.” And I think that what you said about the DC market is something that I've never considered  with the unique clients that that kind of market opens you guys up to. But I'm also curious, I know that you might not be able to disclose names or details, but you did mention briefly some of the clients you've worked with, including like Leidos. Since starting in since founding Design in DC, with your co-founder, has there been sort of a favorite accomplishment or favorite project that you guys have been able to work on? Why has it been so meaningful?

ZF: I think our partnership with with Reflexion, they're a sports cognition startup. I think they went on like Shark Tank or something of that nature and then got some initial funding and turned to us. Why I liked Reflexion was it was a company that really allowed us to push ourselves by way of design. And if you look at their website, reflexion.co, for us, it's not about just doing one offs. We say that all throughout the sales process, that we don't want to just be a web design agency that you hire. We want to be your creative partners moving forward as you grow and also to be that second layer of support to push you from a branding and design and development perspective. And so with Reflexion, we started off with a website, and they really liked it. And since then, we've developed other things with them, including a game that they've done with a partnership with Under Armour. We helped them develop this game, which is now on their website, and we did a lot of the design work for that. And you have an ongoing kind of relationship as new things come in. So that's the one that kind of jumps out to me, because I'm a big basketball player. Rob is also; we met playing basketball. It's, for us, a really important thing in our company culture to have these team building exercises where we all get out away from the computer, get into nature. We’ve done some, believe it or not, company hikes with our lawyers, and everyone feels like a human again and not so tethered to their device. Everyone leaves their phones at home and just that, to us really brings us together. For us, it's all about partnerships, and it's about partnerships, not just with our clients, but with our own internal people. 

You know, we have to have creativity, especially as a startup. We didn't have a lot of initial funding money, so we had to find creative ways to bring people into our company that weren't just solely around the money and, and the salary, but rather, also around, “what is the company culture that we're building here?” And as a CEO, I found that to be crucial. I've hired, you know, somebody that is just dedicated to company culture within our company in Adam, and he's really responsible for things like birthdays, making sure that everyone's mental health is in the right place, that we are also hiring diversely, by way of age or ethnicity. So that was a long winded answer, but Reflexion, I would say, is one of our clients that we're most proud of you

BT: Something that I've picked up on in your answers is just how Design in DC is transforming at the moment. And as you know, the Design Nation theme this year was transformation. So I'm curious to know maybe firstly, taking a look back at the past few years, with Design in DC, and then also, just with your work in general, are there any areas of transformation, whether it's in UX design, or technology, or even personal transformation that you found really instrumental to your work?

ZF: That was something that we talked a lot about at the conference. And for me, transformation is a word that can link to so many different things. So I like all the different dimensions you brought up for us. I could definitely say that we have certainly transformed as a company; we're rapidly growing in terms of size, both in terms of revenue and in terms of the amount of people that we're bringing on. 

So I'm always a devil of the detail, and I think that every problem in a company starts from one small detail going wrong. So one big transformational thing that we've done here is really addressing the HR side and the legal side, but also the designers and developers, that there is more of a fluid communication channel between everything. Because as our lawyers were always telling us, legal is always a business conversation and business is always a legal conversation. The two cannot be de-linked, so for us, transforming our communication strategies. For a long time, every touchpoint was with Rob and I, because we were the founders, and everything came from our vision. So where we've transformed in this last year to year and a half is really trusting the people that we've hired to transform their own specific departments, and Nancy, our creative director, does workshops with her designers on a monthly basis to push them to be up to date with the latest design trends, also to find inspirational websites, those types of things, and then making sure that there's a fluid process. 

So another big transformational thing that we've done this year is we've built our own internal app. And in doing that, everything is catered to our process, and it streamlines so many things. All of our projects are in there, all the people that are assigned to each given project has its own unique code, and we're working on the client facing side right now. It's really just again to bring some of those elements that we had in the website to the client and internal experience. So we want our contractors and employees to have that interactive experience when they log on, so we've been integrating with programs like Slack and our accounting software Xero. So trying to push everything. I would say that one of the most difficult things as an entrepreneur is being in so many different platforms that communication gets lost. And as you grow, it's really important to have repeatable processes that are easy to understand, and when we deviate, what are the what are the plans behind that? It's what allows growth. If you are tethered as the business owner to every day-to-day process, you will never be able to grow. And you know, for me, doing speaking engagements is a new thing that's really important for me. I want us to get out there into the design world. And that's why I really loved your conference, because I got to meet the new generation of designers, and a lot of them are pushing the edge in terms of what they do and what they bring to the world conceptually. I always think it's really important to be transformational in that regard as well: where do we stand in the design world? How are we engaging with that and pushing back against conventions and interacting with those new conventions to create websites that are engaging? Finally, just conclude what I was saying about HR and legal, our legal team has now started to come on to our project management call, so that we can be forward thinking terms of any legal concerns that come up. “Hey, listen, this client’s being a little bit pushy here. What are some steps that we can take to mitigate risk?” It’s always for me about mitigating risk, and for me, it's never about going to court from a legal perspective. It’s always about following the dispute resolution process and even before that, taking the necessary steps to bring the temperature down, if things get heated it, which is undoubtably going to happen in a creative environment. Not everyone thinks the same way creatively, and sometimes, expectations are different than others. 

So having that steady stream really mitigates problems, allows us to find a problem when it's there, and quickly rectify it. On the HR side, it's another really difficult thing because as a small and growing business, things are just always put to the wayside, but how a person comes into the company, what is the welcome letter? What is their introduction to this virtual environment that you're throwing them into? Are they feeling welcome? Are they feeling like part of a family? Or are they feeling like just another cog in the machine? So those kind of concerns is to me really helps with retention, and not just having constant turnover. Investing in that, in the long run, will save you on the money that you may spend on trying to have to hire a new person. That's what I would say in terms of transformation, overall, just  transformation in terms of company structure and understanding how that structure relates to the workflow of your company on a day to day basis.

BT: I really liked how you segmented it into those different areas of transformation. And one thing that stuck out to me that I don't think I've ever heard before, and I would just like love to highlight is the part that you were talking about how when you're designing, there's bound to be conflict and creative differences. I think that's something that a lot of people, generally describing the design world, gloss over, and so I thought that was really interesting with your perspective on how to manage that. 

And I think that also answered my other question about as an executive, how you balance managing the company's vision as well as fulfilling day to day roles. So what one component of your vision at Design in DC, is telling these compelling stories for these clients. And so I'm curious if you could describe the way that your team goes about uncovering the stories and determining which stories to tell. I think that we do live in a world where just as a consumer of media myself, the things that stand out to me are the advertisements, or the brands that, tell the best stories and tell the most compelling stories.

ZF: Great, thank you for that question. I approach storytelling from from a film standpoint. The way we're taught in film school, and the way I teach my students is, if you haven't hooked the audience by the first, let's say, few seconds in a commercial and in a film, let's say a feature film, you have to engage them in the first 10 minutes, or else they'll turn it off. So it becomes a little bit more immediate with something like TV. For us, it's always about engaging the user in a way that is dynamic and compelling and forces the user to engage. So what do I mean by that? Well, it could be clicking a call to action; it could also be just hovering your mouse over something that is interactive, that allows you to think about one of the concepts of the company in a different way. There's many different ways that you can engage the user from a storytelling perspective. And at the end of the day, for brands and their website, it's very important. There's many different uses of a website and understanding those different uses. Every different user has a different journey and a different path to understanding the story. So making sure there are multiple stories there and that are ones that are catered to multiple different audiences, so that we're not just telling one kind of static story, but really a dynamic one that gets the conversation started. For us, it's all about conversation and collaboration and creativity. That's what makes the world turn. And you know, if someone doesn't want to engage with the story, then they're not going to want to engage with your product, or whatever you may be doing, whatever you may be selling, even if it's an idea. So, for us, it's all about storytelling to push direct engagement.

“Every different user has a different journey and a different path to understanding the story. So making sure there are multiple stories there and that are ones that are catered to multiple different audiences, so that we’re not just telling one kind of static story, but really a dynamic one that gets the conversation started. ”

BT: My last question is, this is one I’m sure you've been over during the conference itself, just one piece of advice that you would give to students looking to enter a creative industry. I know that, so your background is particularly rich in a breath of creative products and creative industries, so I'm really curious to get your insight

ZF: My advice for the new generation of designers is, and I said this at the conference, was really to not be afraid of mistakes. I look back to my days on set when I first started at film school, and I was doing everything from sound to lights to producing, and I made a lot of mistakes. People told me; I appreciated the honesty of people saying it right to my face. Making mistakes is some people are afraid of that and think that that's a negative thing. But that is really the way human beings learn. Nobody's going to waltz into a job and be at the top. And if they are, then maybe you don't have someone that's pushing you to that next level. So I believe that everyone can be pushed and find those people that don't allow you to stagnate. A lot of people at the conference come from some of the best schools from around the world, the Ivy League schools, and there's often this idea probably all throughout high school, and I don't want to stereotype Ivy League students, but they were at the top of their class or at least were performing at the upper echelon. So this idea that you're going to always be there sometimes allows some students to be stagnant. So, be that person that is the underdog, put yourself in the places that that do not allow you to feel comfortable. Find someone that says, “maybe you want to do it this way, or maybe you want to do it that way.” Don't be comfortable in one position. Find the people that push you and also push yourself, and that will always create the best kind of career and a constantly evolving career and allow you to be open to many different options and potential new skill sets that you can add to your arsenal.