Design Week: 1986-2023
Design Week closes, having championed design excellence for the past 38 years.
It’s with a heavy heart that in lieu of our usual ‘breaking up for Christmas’ post, we bring you the news that Design Week is ceasing publication with immediate effect. Design Week’s parent company, Centaur, has made the decision to close the publication as its strategy shifts towards its “core audience of marketers, and focuses on training, information, and intelligence”.
In the New Year, editor Tom Banks will be returning to take a look back at Design Week’s achievements, having championed design excellence since 1986.
While Tom will be back on email as of 8 January, please bear in mind that he might not be as speedy as usual to respond to enquiries, as Design Week will be operating with a skeleton editorial team during this challenging time. Tom will be leaving the business on 19 January, when the website will cease to be online.
If anything is very urgent today (Friday 22 December), please contact Emily Gosling. Today is also Abbey Bamford’s last day with Design Week.
We wish our readers all the very best over the Christmas break, and thank you all for your engagement, inspiration, creativity, and loyalty over the years.
Until the new year,
DW (Abbey Bamford, and Emily Gosling, and Tom Banks)
This is the saddest “media” news I have heard for decades. Design Week, when Lynda Relph Knight was the editor, was a beacon in our world giving us news, comment, and often a challenging critique of our world. Then, under Tom’s leadership the brand grew into what it is now, a must read for many. To lose a respected publication like this is a sad moment certainly for us all at ACID. Oh dear….Centaur morphing into a “core audience of marketers, and focuses on training, information, and intelligence” seems bland and colourless and is a sad loss to design. Big thanks to Emily, Abbey and Tom and all good wishes for 2024
Such a massive shame to read this guys. I found my first job in the design industry in 1991 from a tiny ad in your job pages. When my first agency did a piece of work worthy enough to be reported, it was DW that covered it. Each Thursday gave a moment to catch up with what work our friends and peers (and competitors!) were launching. The opinion pieces were always insightful and of the moment. It really was a champion of the industry.
Thank you DW, and best of luck to the team as you move onto new things.
What?! ???? No more Design Week?! Such a shame! DW has always been there, a constant light for our industry – our North Star in some ways!? What are we going to do without you? I still have some of the early print copies with latest work, news, league tables and those dreaded salary comparisons! Print. Remember that?
Look Tom, Emily and Abbey Thankyou and good luck!
I am really sorry to hear that news. As a freelancer for many years working mainly on my own I have come to rely on Design Week for all the latest news and trends and getting to know what is going on elsewhere in the world of design. I don’t really know how this is going to work in future and it will leave a big gap in my understanding and knowledge of the world of design both in the UK around the globe. I have been critical of some of the things I have seen and also very supportive and enthusiastic about projects and new ideas. It has kept me up-to-date and also given me a forum to share and air my comments as it will have done for many others including for example, Mike Dempsey whose insightful comments I have always enjoyed reading. Hope something will take the place of Design Week or we really will be less well-informed.
Such sad news. Design Week was generous to give me a platform alongside real industry luminaries when I still owned Spring, and I saw our progress in your rankings as an important metric. Thank you for your support and my best wishes to the team for your future endeavours.
This is terribly sad news, for the staff who brought us all the news for the past 38 years, and also for the design industry. Seeing what others are doing, showcasing their output and running articles about everything we hold dear has been invaluable. I teach at an FE college and I’m always pointing students to your site. The closure of such an amazing repository of knowledge is a real loss.
Not the Christmas break post I was expecting!
I’m echoing everyone else’s sentiments. A real shame to lose the magazine—one of the few that covered critical design industry news. It was still a daily visit after reading for 25 years. Thank you for all the great news over the decades.
Thanks for all your support over the years. A great deal of the work we’ve been lucky enough to have knock on our door at JKR over the years was very likely down to pieces shared on here. Our industry will be poorer for not having a publication that focuses on design.
Hope everyone affected goes on to great things elsewhere and finds work soon.
Terrible news. I wish the team the best of luck in whatever you do next, it’s a massive loss to see Design Week go.
Such a shame. Have enjoyed this publication for years.
Seems a shame to see it just disappear at night… Can Centaur give to the people?!
Sad to hear the news.
Thanks for all of the info, insights throughout the years.
Also, it’s been a privilege to be featured so thank you for showcasing my work too.
All the best to each of the team for the future.
Karl
Very sad news. I have followed DW and sometimes even contributed since you first started and I will miss the regular news and insight very much. I want to wish you all at DW all the very best for the future and thank you.
We are all going to miss Design Week terribly. Don’t forget to give Jeremy Myerson a mention, he was the very first editor of Design Week ….wasn’t he?
What sad news. DW has been a fixture of the design industry for as long as I’ve worked within it, an important source of news, insight, opinion and – perhaps more in the days when it was an actual inky – scurrilous gossip too. I’d say that any mature, respected and nationally significant industry needs a ‘trade’ publication, and DW was most definitely that for the design industry. Perhaps the likes of It’s Nice That, Creative Boom, Brand New and others have taken that mantle. I hope so: we need these gathering places to help us feel connected to a creative community. RIP DW.
So sorry to hear that such an iconic title will not be retained, and how hard it must be for you personally Abbey, Tom and Emily. Wishing you all the very best, and thanks for championing great design, from the large to the small.
This is terrible news 🙁 I’ve been reading your publication since I was at school and there is nothing else like it centering around the UK design industry. You will all be sorely missed. I was so proud in 2023 to have my work and opinions featured in not 1 but 2 seperate pieces, something I never thought I would ever do.
I wish all the staff affected well and hope that something new might come together from the ashes.
This is incredibly sad news, I’ve had DW with me throughout my entire career so this is devastating to hear.
Such a surprise and such a shame to hear this news.
Rather than switching things off, is there no way the site could be somehow archived or hosted elsewhere?
The site must carry several decades worth of valuable insights, data and ideas that would benefit the sector as a whole. If only as a reference point rather than a living entity.
Huge thanks to the team at Design Week past and present for running such a great and foundational part of the news surrounding commercial creativity.
Truly end of an era.
+ this!
A further comment echoing Simon Manchipp’s comments is whether my email archive of back issues of Design Week will still work as I do look at it from time to time and have every digital issue going back to 2016. I just opened a couple of the DW emails at random and it is obvious that the servers have been switched off as all the articles before 2023 are no longer available.
hi Neil, ah that’s strange – sorry that’s not working… I’ve just tried on a few different devices and I can still access old content, is that still the case for you? Really appreciate you letting me know as we should still have access to it for sure
Design Week is an institution what a loss to the industry. I remember my first copy when it was in print, I remember when I was made redundant from FutureBrand and I started Two Smoking Barrels 20 years ago with an add in the freelancer’s section, I remember every year reading who the top 100 were and keeping up with the news. It was a staple coffee table go-to and a shame it went solely online in its last years, possibly leading to its eventual demise.
It’s a huge shame I hope someone takes up the gauntlet and makes a new publication to fill the gap.
I couldn’t believe this news this morning. I’ve loved Design Week since the 80s.
Wishing you all the best for the future thank you so much for all your work.
Big love to you all
Devastating news to hear that Design Week is closing down. I launched the publication as founder-editor in autumn1986 because I felt that if architects could have two weekly papers (Building Design and AJ) and advertising agencies one (Campaign), then designers (industrial, graphic, interior etc) deserved their own weekly journal too. Lynda RelphTimes change and 24/7 digital
I would add that Lynda Relph Knight was a brilliant editor of the paper over many years who took the concept forward and made DW so central to the UK design industry. Surely the Design Week brand could be saved and given new life in the era of 24/7 digital communication.
This is a real shame! DW has been one of my daily design news reads for a long time now. And what about the DW awards, assume they’ve gone too? ????
Be great if the Design Museum were to host a permanent digital archive even with a touch terminal in situ? Publications with such great history deserve to become museum exhibits.
My first job as an editorial assistant all those years ago. Thank you for giving me a stepping stone Design Week. Many special memories were had working under the editorial leadership of Lynda Relph-Knight, and working with Angus, Tom and Emily x
I’m very sad to hear this – a very talented group of people, with a clear creative vision.
Very best of luck for the future xx
Really sorry to hear this news. Thank you for all the great insights and features down the years. DW started when I was in second year at college and I have been a regular read ever since – I’ll miss it. Very best wishes to you all.
Well that is a bummer! Is there nothing on gods earth that can be done to cajole the powers that be into changing their (blinkered) minds? We have the overbearing feeling of loosing a limb here at the DOD offices. Design week has been a cornerstone of the industry if not a keystone, if we are in the mason area of analogies. Can we not resurrect the concept as design fortnight?
Echoing the comments above. Such a shame, it was a great magazine with valuable insights. Sorry to see it go.
I was extremely sorry to hear of the demise of the magazine, Design Week. I was there at very the beginning. In 1986, Jeremy Myerson 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. He asked what I thought of the idea and showed me the proposed format. I told him I thought it was a brilliant concept and was bound to be a success; and so it was. Jeremy did an outstanding job. 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. We at Lloyd Northover were delighted to be featured on its cover on several occasions. Design Week provided a crucial service for the design profession, and will be greatly missed.
I’m so sorry to hear this news. I’ve read Design Week since the 90’s and it’s been invaluable. Our industry will be so much poorer and less well informed without you. Thank you so much for all of your work over the years.
This is a real shame. I remember flicking through DW mags at art college in order to find the agencies I wanted to apply for placements with back in the 90s. And then once I had a job in design it was a real buzz to get some work featured in the pages – we’d over opening the mag every Thursday. The awards were always a close second to D&AD as ‘ones to win’ in the UK too – expertly judged and full of iconic design work. Thanks to Lynda, Tom and the team for all the support over the years – I’m sure we’ve got more than a few projects off the back of coverage by DW. You’ll be missed.
The death of any publication is cause for sadness, and this is no exception.
What is not clear is whether the online DW will comtinue.
So even the online DW ends on 19 January.
What a shame, though maybe an enterprising publisher type could fire up a successor ‘DW Redux’. Hope so.
I must thank Lynda Relph-Knight, who, 23 years ago when she was DW’s editor, encouraged me to write and offered me Design Week as a platform to do whatever I wanted, for which I am eternally grateful to her and DW for setting me off on that path which has continued. The passing of DW as a physical magazine in 2011 was sadly inevitable. Still, over the past few years, the public has rediscovered the importance of material things: vinyl records, roll film and books. Holding and turning the pages of a book or magazine is very much back in vogue. Conversely, the expanding noise and demands of the digital world are exhausting with ever-more online magazines. One of the things I noticed with DW over the past couple of years was a downturn in reader engagement with the many items posted by DW. We live in an age where people don’t want to write anything longer than a sentence; sadly, that is what social media has done to us.
So sorry to hear that Design Week is ceasing publication! DW provided so much valuable insight and was a great source of inspiration for creatives across the industry. I hope that the rich editorial content and analysis provided over the past 37 years won’t be lost. All the best to the DW team!
Such a constant throughout my career, from when I got my first copy as a student 25+ yrs ago. Eager for Thursday mornings trip to the newsagent to collect my copy.
Well done and thank you to everyone involved, you certainly inspired this student all those years ago.