Design Week at 40: Motorbike Crashes, Fake Bylines and a Church Pulpit

Design Week published its first issue on 26 September 1986, with a cover story on two interior designers bidding for the 1988 Seoul Olympics. Forty years on, founding editor Jeremy Myerson sat down with the title to recount how it came together — bringing along a remarkably well-preserved copy of Issue 1.

That first issue also carried a live report filed direct from the Milan Furniture Fair, included specifically to prove that a weekly design paper could operate in real-time, and a scoop that Saatchi & Saatchi were buying up design firms to create Saatchi Design.

In 1986, designers were the backroom relations of the creative world, Myerson recalls. Advertisers and marketers took the limelight while designers sat in the shadows. Design Week was built to challenge that: a confident, fast-moving weekly business paper treating design as a commercial powerhouse rather than a polite cultural hobby.

The dummy issue and the 1965 cup winners

Before launch, Myerson — working behind the scenes at Centaur Communications — built a dummy issue with veteran publisher Peter Williams and art director Bob Bateman. The mock cover showed visual identity pioneer Wally Olins, tongue-in-cheek, designing luncheon vouchers.

Copy was scarce and the title was top-secret, so Myerson, a lifelong Liverpool fan born in Mill Road Maternity Hospital in Everton, needed pseudonyms. The dummy went to potential advertisers carrying erudite design critiques attributed to Roger Hunt, Ian Callahan and Ian St. John — the 1965 FA Cup-winning Liverpool team. Years later, a friend of Myerson's met two of those former players in a Spanish hotel bar on a golfing holiday and told them their names had launched a trade magazine. They found it hilarious.

Wax boards, scalpels and a motorbike crash

Production was physical. On Tuesday nights the editorial team gathered in Hoxton Square — then a rough corner of East London — running phototypeset columns through a desktop waxer, laying them onto grid boards and aligning them by hand with scalpels and T-squares. A motorcycle courier drove the locked artwork through the night down the M4 to a printer in South Wales so the magazine hit newsstands on Thursday morning.

Then the courier came off his bike on the M4. The artwork survived; publication slipped from Thursday to Friday.

Print mistakes were permanent. Myerson signed off a cover feature on ceramic design team Queensberry Hunt with the name spelled correctly, only for a compositor at the press to "correct" it to Queensbury on the plates. Thousands of copies rolled off the line misspelled, and Myerson phoned David Queensberry the next morning to break the news.

Six weeks of panic

The launch campaign was ecclesiastical: print ads pictured copies of Design Week on a church pulpit beneath the headline "If you believe in design", alongside a stairway to heaven headlined "Where do all good designers go to?" Readers snapped up charter subscriptions at £10 for 50 issues, but display advertising lagged. Six weeks in, Centaur management called crisis meetings. Myerson and ad manager Roger Beckett pleaded for time, arguing agencies simply weren't used to buying space in a weekly design title. Management held its nerve and advertising poured in.

The timing helped. Design Week arrived weeks before the "Big Bang" deregulation of the City of London, when financial institutions suddenly wanted corporate identity, workspace design and branding. The Design Business Association launched and the Business Design Centre opened in Islington. Terence Conran, Rodney Fitch, Michael Peters, Wally Olins and Michael Wolf became household names, and Design Week reporters covered fierce rivalries over major retail accounts.

From CAD panics to AI interns

Myerson sees continuity in the industry's anxieties. In the late 80s, studios panicked that Computer-Aided Design would decimate craft; today the same fear centres on artificial intelligence. A recent Design Council report argues AI will act like the office intern — hoovering up junior, repetitive tasks while leaving strategy, empathy and creative problem-solving to experienced designers.

Myerson recalls a definition from the legendary Pentagram partner Alan Fletcher: "Design is a mental utensil. It isn't a chair or a typeface or a vase. It's a way of thinking and a way of acting."

A Merseyside thread runs through the title's history: Myerson grew up in Liverpool; his successor, the formidable editor Linda Ralph Knight, who built the title and the Design Week Awards over 20 years, hailed from Formby; and the title's headquarters have now returned to Liverpool, operating in the shadow of the city's two cathedrals as an independent digital publication.

Forty years on from the Seoul Olympics cover, the landscape is tougher and more contested, but the belief launched on that church pulpit in 1986 remains: design matters, human ingenuity counts, and it is always worth making a noise about.