Welcome (back) to the new Design Week

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