Launching any media platform is hard. There are so many decisions to make, scenarios to model, and trade-offs to make peace with. A relaunch brings its own specific challenges. What to keep? What to change? What to get rid of?
I see us as raucous cheerleaders for design and designers. We want to celebrate the things – people, work, ideas – that make the industry great. And we’re determined to support those working to address its shortcomings.
A lot of it boils down to questions and spreadsheets – what are we going to do, and how are we going to do it?
The first task was to understand the DNA that makes Design Week special. We’ve spent a lot of time listening, and we are very grateful to all the people who’ve shared their thoughts on how we can best serve the community. From all four previous editors to many designers, partners and industry people, their insights helped us clarify where a new Design Week should position itself.
We also looked at the data.
Using a Chat GPT-based LLM, our dev team was able to categorise 57,000 Design Week articles, going back to the late 1990s. This helped us create an incredibly detailed picture of the designers, clients, industries and disciplines that DW has covered over the years. From this, we could both identify existing strengths, and see where some of the gaps might be.
Finally, it was important to map the creative media landscape in 2024.
Designers get inspiration and information from all sorts of places – not just the many excellent websites and blogs around, but also social media and Substack. There is no point doubling up in areas that are already well covered –rather we need to look for the white space where we can really add value.
And so based on all of this work, we have some specific plans for what the new Design Week will do.
Cover more digital design work
According to the Design Council, digital design contributes £53.9 billion to the UK economy, more than every other design discipline combined. The same report says 44% of UK designers are working on digital, so it’s important we cover the people, the work and the ideas driving this sector forward.
Put more focus on design outside of London
The capital is a design powerhouse, home to one third of our design businesses. But it follows that two thirds of our design businesses are elsewhere, and we want to reflect that. And it’s important not to treat the rest of the country as a homogenous whole – we want to delve into the particular scenes all around the UK and Ireland, from Brighton and Bradford, to Dublin and Dundee.
Maintain and expand Design Week’s traditional business focus
This means we will:
- Document and champion the business impact of design, on companies, other organisations, and society as a whole.
- Report on industry trends and the wider forces that affect it.
- Dig into what it means to run a design business, the highs and the lows, and help design leaders learn from each other.
We are keeping the breadth that has always characterised our remit. In 1986, the founding editor Jeremy Myerson showed his bosses a diagram of what the new title would cover. The three points of his triangle were graphics, product and environment.
We’ve tweaked that slightly to screens, spaces, and things, to reflect our interest in design in its real-world applications. Across it all, we want to focus on design as problem solving, that magical combination of thinking and doing that we all prize so highly.
The final piece of the puzzle is community. We don’t know exactly what form that will take, but time and again we heard that designers crave connection with other designers, and we may have a role to play in that.
Of course at this stage, all these ideas are untested, shimmeringly perfect in their abstraction. Some of our instincts and plans will be right, some will be way-off. Part of the fun will be learning which is which.
And to that end, it’s vital we keep these conversations with the design world going. In the comments, on social, or via email ([email protected]), we are committed to listening to, and learning from you. We may not always agree, but we’ll always be willing to have a chat about it.
In the very first issue of Design Week, Jeremy Myerson wrote the magazine would, “open up new lines of communication in the industry.” That ambition remains, nearly 40 years later.
He also wrote, “Your warm reaction to our new venture has made worthwhile all the traumas of launching a new magazine.” This too rings true – thank you to everyone who helped us get to this point. Let’s go.
Rob Alderson, Editor
16 responses to “Welcome (back) to the new Design Week”
Very excited to see the new content!
Bring on the screens, spaces, and things! Glad to have you back, DW.
Good to have you back 💪🏼
Super stoked to see you back, DW!
Love that your back and your tweaked triangle – screens, spaces and things sounds great.
I’m sold!
Fantastic that you’re back with a commitment to digital and design beyond London. I love the new typography and platform structure – the vibe feels right!
It’s so lovely to have you, as the original founder of Design Week, coming in with kind words! I remember our early conversations when I was thinking if I was insane or correct in taking on Design Week and I felt that you really helped us to really understand the original DNA that you helped create. You were incredibly helpful and clearly still passionate about the brand. This is an exciting new adventure for all of us who are involved, and we have many plans to roll out new features in the coming year that will help designers and their firms to find work. Thank you!
Great to have you back!
Welcome back. It was always great seeing all the latest work and hearing from inspiring designers, it was nice to be featured once or twice. Looking forward to the future.
So pleased to see the ‘original and best’ world view on design back in action. The 80’s are defo back in fashion!
An excellent initiative. Best of luck to the design Week team. I’m looking forward to reading future content.
It’s really great to have you back! In 1986, Jeremy came to see me at Lloyd Northover with a mock-up of a weekly design journal he was planning to launch; he was to be its first editor and he asked what I thought of the idea. I said it was a brilliant concept and was bound to be a success. As we all know, Design Week went on to provide a key focus for the burgeoning British design industry; it championed and promoted the design profession; through its pages, events and gatherings it encouraged debate and supported a sense of community and camaraderie among designers. Design Week provided a crucial service for the design profession and it is wonderful to see it back in that role. I wish you every success!
Brilliant to see you back, great content and design. Made me a bit nostalgic to see such great work come to life again, and link the community, love the cartoon moment at the start, Thank heavens for a bit of quality returning.
Great to have you back! Been a staple of my career and looking forward to reading the new content!
I really do wish you look and all you say is so interesting. Championing the creatives outside of London will be very welcomed, across the South East there are small towns and Cites that have a very strong creative communities. In the Town of lewes we have a huge number of small design businesses over indexing in Graphics, Retail, illustration, digital, architectural and Design. There creative reach spans across the globe. They may be small studios or sole traders but many have worked within the bigger London Studios.
Good luck and look forward to reading more.
Welcome back!