Creative Review

About Creative Review

Every creative industry needs a mirror — a publication that shows designers, art directors and advertisers what great work looks like, who is making it and where the culture is heading. For Britain's creative community, that mirror has been Creative Review since 1980: a magazine about commercial creativity that covers graphic design, advertising, photography, branding, digital products, film and gaming with a visual intelligence few titles can match. Its covers — typically bold exercises in typography, photography and illustration — are collectors' items, and its annuals are the industry's yearbooks of the best visual work on the planet.

Published in London, Creative Review appears in print bimonthly and publishes daily online at creativereview.co.uk, alongside a podcast. In September 2025 it was acquired by Haymarket Media Group as part of the deal that also brought Marketing Week and the Festival of Marketing into the group. Below is a detailed profile of the publication: its origins, its editorial character, its awards and annuals, its ownership history and its influence on visual culture.

Origins: A Supplement Becomes a Magazine

Creative Review first appeared in 1980 as a quarterly supplement to Marketing Week, published by Marketing Week Communications. The first issue — Volume 1, Number 1, dated May 1980 — was edited by Torin Douglas and designed by Bob Bateman, and set out an agenda that the title has followed ever since: profiling agencies, production houses, illustrators, designers and directors; examining how notable campaigns were created; and reporting on the latest creative work in America and Europe, printed with "lots of pictures, many of them in full colour".

The supplement proved so successful that it became a stand-alone monthly magazine, serving the commercial arts and design scene of a Britain then in the throes of the advertising and design booms of the 1980s. It was the right title at the right moment: London was becoming a world centre of creative excellence, and Creative Review gave that scene its journal of record.

Editorial Focus

Creative Review covers commercial creativity in all its forms: advertising, graphic design, illustration, photography, typography, branding, digital products, film, music videos and gaming. Its journalism combines news and features with the showcasing of work — the campaigns, identities, typefaces, photographs and films that define the visual culture of the moment — and with interviews with the practitioners behind them.

The magazine's content draws principally on work originating in the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States, and it has always taken visual presentation as seriously as the work it covers: design, art direction and print production are part of the editorial statement. Cover art typically features typography, photography, graphics and illustration — rarely the artists themselves — making each issue a design object in its own right.

The Annuals and Awards

Creative Review runs several awards and competitions through the year, but its most celebrated products are its annuals. Creative Review – The Annual is a double issue showcasing the best work of the year in visual communication across advertising, graphic design, digital media, packaging, music videos and related fields — the industry's definitive round-up of creative excellence. A separate Photography Annual does the same for the year's best photography.

To be featured in the Annual is one of the highest honours in commercial creativity: agencies and studios submit their best work, and selection confers a prestige that money cannot buy. The annuals have become historical documents in their own right, charting the evolution of visual culture year by year.

Notable Moments

The magazine's history includes episodes that reveal much about the creative industry it covers. In 2007 it emerged that the February 2007 edition's guest editorship had been sold to the advertising agency Mother for £15,000 — though the then-editor retained overall editorial control, the story sparked debate about the boundaries between editorial and advertising in the creative press.

Editorially, the title was shaped for two decades by Patrick Burgoyne, who edited it from 1999 and oversaw its evolution from a monthly print magazine into a multi-platform brand. The current editor is Eliza Williams. The magazine launched a full website in 2009 — after two years of running a blog that Burgoyne had found "successful" but "limiting" — and introduced an online subscription in April 2018, with a selection of articles reserved for paying readers.

Format and Frequency

For most of its life Creative Review was a monthly magazine; in July 2017 it went bimonthly, with six print issues published each year. The change reflected the economics of specialist print publishing and the shift of daily creative news to the website, allowing the print edition to concentrate on longer features, portfolios and the visual showcases that paper does best.

The magazine carries the ISSN 0262-1037 and is published in English from London for a global readership — its coverage of international work and its reputation mean it is read well beyond Britain, wherever commercial creativity is practised.

Ownership: From Centaur to Haymarket

Creative Review was for most of its modern history owned by Centaur Media plc, sitting within its Xeim marketing and creative division alongside Marketing Week. Under Centaur the brand developed its digital offering, its awards business and its events, becoming one of the group's flagship creative titles.

In September 2025 Haymarket Media Group acquired Creative Review, Marketing Week and the Festival of Marketing from Centaur Media, in a cash deal for the operating company MWCR Limited with an enterprise value of £3.9 million. The acquisition reunited Creative Review with Campaign — Haymarket's flagship advertising title, launched in 1968 — within Haymarket's Business Media division, where the brands initially continue to operate as a separate business unit under managing director Claire Rance.

The Podcast and Digital Offering

Alongside the print magazine and website, Creative Review produces a podcast, extending its coverage of commercial creativity into audio — interviews and discussions with designers, photographers, directors and other practitioners. The digital offering is aimed at a global audience of creative professionals who consume the brand's content daily online while treating the print issues as collectible showcases.

The website's paywall strategy — a selection of articles available only to subscribers — reflects the brand's confidence in the value of its journalism: in an age of free creative content, Creative Review's curation, criticism and access remain worth paying for.

Influence on Visual Culture

Creative Review's influence extends beyond its readership into the visual culture at large. By deciding which work to feature — which campaigns, which designers, which photographers — it shapes the canon of contemporary commercial creativity. Its covers and annuals are referenced by design schools, its awards launch careers, and its criticism helps set the standards by which creative work is judged.

The magazine has documented every major movement in British and international design and advertising since 1980: the post-punk graphics of the early 1980s, the digital revolution of the 1990s, the branding boom of the 2000s and the social-media era. Its archive is a visual history of commercial creativity.

Recent Developments

Under Haymarket ownership, Creative Review continues to publish bimonthly in print and daily online, serving the creative industries at a moment of profound change — as artificial intelligence reshapes image-making, as the advertising industry consolidates, and as design's role in business continues to grow.

More than 45 years after it began as a quarterly supplement to Marketing Week, Creative Review remains the essential journal of commercial creativity: the publication the creative industries read to see themselves — and to see what comes next.