Diptyk

Diptyk is a Moroccan magazine of contemporary art with real standing in Moroccan and African art. In October 2019 its CIO contacted our team at Arroz Con Pollo, the studio I co-founded with Nabil Nadifi. The request was a complete overhaul of Diptyk's digital strategy and of the way the magazine behaved in marketing and communication.

From October 2019, I led the brand strategy and implementation behind Diptyk’s transformation. Nabil led the project. My responsibility was the repositioning of the magazine’s digital presence and its Instagram strategy, and carrying that strategy through social media, print and new formats.

A serious art magazine carries authority on paper. Online, that authority has to be performed every day, by people who understand the artists, the institutions and the audience at once. The gap I saw was between the standing Diptyk had and the way its channels behaved.

So the decision was to treat social media as editorial work, not as promotion. From October 2019 to August 2020, every piece of content on Diptyk's social platforms was written, created and produced by the studio: the strategy, the copy, the visuals and the publishing rhythm.

That decision set the standard for everything else. A post about an artist had to be as exact as an article about them, because the people reading it were the artists, galleries, curators and collectors the magazine wrote about.

The print side moved at the same time. From issue 52 the magazine carried a new print direction, with Zahra Sebti on art direction. Print and digital were designed as one publication, not as two departments competing for the same material.

Then COVID closed the places where an art magazine is picked up and read. Issue 53/54 was adapted for digital and released online for free. A printed object became something a reader could open anywhere, at the moment people could not go to galleries.

The studio created the DIPTYK podcast, and Arroz Con Pollo recorded, produced and distributed it. Meryem Sebti, Diptyk's co-founder, publisher and editor-in-chief, hosted it. Nabil led production and Simo Bakrim edited. Recording was done remotely, under social distancing, without giving up audio quality.

The conversations brought together artists, curators and institutions around Moroccan and African art. Museums, an independent art space, an art fair, a regional collection and a gallery, heard in one series, gave Diptyk a body of recorded knowledge that outlasts any single issue.

On 12 August 2020, The New York Times included @diptykmagazine in Siddhartha Mitter’s “Five Art Accounts to Follow on Instagram Now”. It came ten months after the new direction began.

That recognition came from the strategy and its implementation: the Instagram strategy and the content we built for the magazine, post by post, to the standard of its printed pages. The account the Times recommended was the editorial presence Arroz Con Pollo had built with Diptyk’s team.

Once the magazine behaved like a platform, brands could build with it. The relationship expanded into partnerships and activations around 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair Marrakech and Audi's Driven by Art programme. For Audi and Diptyk at 1-54, the studio designed the brand programming and ran a 360 degree content campaign around the fair. That work has its own record.

In July 2020 the studio also produced, with Diptyk, two short documentaries on Mohamed Melehi and Chaïbia for OCP's art patronage. The magazine's credibility with artists was what a patron and a car maker came to build on.

This was a studio's work and the credits are specific. Nabil Nadifi led the project and the podcast production. Zahra Sebti directed the new print from issue 52. Simo Bakrim edited the podcast. Meryem Sebti hosted it. I led Brand Strategy & Implementation as a co-founder of Arroz Con Pollo. I left the studio in 2022. Quantum Branding came later.