Sydney Allen-Ash

SYDNEY ALLEN-ASH is a writer, editor, and strategist from Toronto living in New York. She has led global internal communications for Condé Nast and VICE Media Group. She has an M.A. in Cultural Reporting and Criticism from New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism School. Her writing has been published by SSENSE, Early, and Good Sport magazines. Her commercial clients include adidas, Asics, Ciele Athletics, Nike, Oakley, On Running, Reebok, Sephora, and Spotify.

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Most recently, Sydney edited "Our Floors Are Uneven," an anthology of essays and photos for Brooklyn-based furniture store and design studio Lichen to celebrate their fifth anniversary. The book was written about by HYPEBEAST.

Previously, Sydney hosted a documentary for On Running. She also wrote the foreword to "HARD-SHELL®" by Joshua P. Matthews. She then wrote about "HARD-SHELL®" for SSENSE magazine, the story was published online and in print in an issue fronted by Chloë Sevigny. Sydney hosted a panel discussion for the book at the iconic independent bookstore Printed Matter in New York City. She was also selected as a Juror for the Fusion Pencil Award by The One Club for Creativity in 2023.

In 2021, Sydney began working as a part-time professor at George Brown College’s School of Design in Toronto. She created Early, "a work magazine for real life," for HR consultancy Bright + Early and edited and wrote for the magazine until April 2023. Also in 2021, she hosted the five-part series Work Place, a podcast “exploring the futures of where and how we work” with guests like world-renowned photographer Edward Burtynsky, CEO of New Lab Shaun Stewart, and best-selling author Rahaf Harfoush. And she created of Toenails, a long-form narrative podcast "about running and also not about running" made for Ciele Athletics.

Sydney has been the host, producer, and guest of many live speaking engagements. Most recently, she has produced live events for the global staff of Condé Nast featuring leaders from across the company including Roger Lynch, CEO of Condé Nast, Anna Wintour, Chief Content Officer, David Remnick, Editor of The New Yorker, Katie Drummond, Global Editorial Director of WIRED, Will Welch, Global Editorial Director of GQ, Chioma Nnadi, Head of Editorial Content for British Vogue and more. Prior to this, she hosted In Talks with Es Devlin, set designer for the likes Beyoncé, U2, Kanye West, Adele, and more. She also hosted an artist talk with celebrated photographers Yasin Osman and Jamal Burger for The Design Exchange. She hosted and co-produced BetterDone, a full-day conference by VICE Canada. She is also a regular guest on the strategic foresight and futures show Broadcast From Later.

In addition to this, Sydney has designed and hosted educational workshops for adidas and Virtue Worldwide, the agency by VICE. She was a keynote speaker for the Year End Show at George Brown College’s School of Design in 2021 and a speaker on the Design For An Equitable Future panel by RGD Design Thinkers in 2020.

Select Projects

The Internal Hub is an app made for VICE Media Group (VMG) employees designed to increase connectivity, awareness, and alignment amongst the staff in ways that were previously impossible.

While working as Senior Manager of Global Internal Communications (IC) at VMG I conceptualized the Internal Hub as part of an IC strategy to streamline and modernize the employee experience of roughly 3000 staff who worked in 30+ countries on several different brands and businesses. However, when COVID began, the Hub evolved, in the eyes of the corporate and executive team, as an indispensable tool for connection and communication.

Internal Hub Homepage

The hub has many custom features that I specifically identified as solutions to problems that VMG staff faced. The Announcements Banner on the left-hand side of the Hub’s home screen was made for quick and easy global communication, allowing us to rely less on time-intensive, inbox-overloading emails. The Content Ticker running across the bottom of the Hub shows a constantly updating stream of editorial work across all brands, businesses, and geographies. Each item on the ticker linked out to its respective platform, allowing staff easy access to and awareness of their coworkers’ work. The Screening Room was a secure streaming library where we uploaded new video content from VMG teams that were pay-walled or geo-blocked. This finally allowed VMG staff—whose primary medium has always been video—to easily view each other’s work. The Shortcut Bar on the top right included preset shortcuts to important “always-on” external resources like the DEI Dashboard and also allowed users to add their own personalized shortcuts. The Global Calendar on the right-hand side centralized all company-wide events with clickable zoom links. The Employee Directory is integrated with the HCM software Workday to provide an easily searchable database of all staff. The Podcast Player allowed for easy uploading of the internal podcast we made for staff.

I brought in my long-time creative partner, 56, for the design and development of the Hub. Through the compatibility of our teamwork, I was able to fluidly switch from corporate quarterback to creative strategist, to project manager, to fledgling UX researcher throughout the project’s 10-month timeline. My responsibilities included wrangling the teams, access, and data feeds necessary to create the Hub’s multiple API-enabled features, managing communication of the project’s progress with the many internal stakeholders across the Communications, HR, IT, Editorial, Executive, and Marketing teams, and scrutinizing every aspect of the Hub’s design and functionality through countless rounds of feedback and user testing.