Risk, control and growing a team: Elizabeth Azen Andia, Global Head of Media Creative at Bloomberg, on the Design Next podcast

Elizabeth Azen Andia has just finished three years, three months and three days at The Wall Street Journal, where she was VP, Brand Creative Director. She’s in her “building a studio inside of a corporation” era – something we’ll come back to later.

Before her time at the Journal, she ran her own design studio for 12 years. The move in-house came at a stretched moment, with a young family and a growing business. She wanted more focus and a greater team support around her, and she wanted to know what her impact could look like from the inside… However embedded a studio becomes, she says, “at the end of the day, you’re still on the outside.”

Now? Well, Elizabeth just started her new role last week. She’s joined Bloomberg as Global Head of Media Creative.

It’s worth noting that Elizabeth doesn’t see her career as having any real failures and fortunes; she doesn’t see her career in such a binary way. There is more to it than that…

Elizabeth’s independent studio was thriving. It’s easy to assume that running your own business gives you freedom in every sense, but actually there were some constraints.

“I constrained myself in some sense by not having the risk tolerance to grow bigger.”

An example of that in action: not taking on a partner, and not growing when the chance was there.

At the Wall Street Journal, the team grew fast and the remit kept expanding, so she learnt a new version of what control looks like, and this levelled up her sense of freedom.

Between parenting, a corporate role and leading a large team, she describes the last few years as:

“incredible lessons in losing control – or just acknowledging that we don’t actually have any to begin with.”

An important lesson here: Parenting has shaped how Elizabeth leads: “not through control, but through guidance, observation, curiosity.”

Some people are just born to be designers, aren’t they?

Tearing though a copy of Colors magazine at 14 or 15 had pointed Elizabeth towards design, yet she studied journalism. An ‘aha’ moment arrived when she developed a drive to make her own magazine.

Going to design school at 26 felt late, and for a time felt like putting life on hold. “Well, I wasn’t on hold at all. It was like a total accelerant.” Grad school brought a grant, a project with the Getty Museum and work straight out of her grad show. A year later she had her own studio.

Zooming out, Elizabeth brings a hot take on where design may be failing.

Companies that pride themselves on test and learn are rushing AI adoption with unrealistic expectations of more, better, faster.

She’s less worried about blanding, since every art movement is a reaction to the one before it. Her bigger question is what brands do when they no longer design the canvas their content lands on.

So, does fortune favour the brave? Yes, she says, because “to do something new is to be brave”. As for what comes next, she wants to do “good work with good people, and for good people.”