Rising Stars

Any industry is only as good as the new talent coming through and design is no exception. Some of you will remember the dearth of middleweight designers in the wake of the recession of the early 1990s and the dotcom bust of 2001 – no one had had the foresight, or the projects, to bring on a new generation of designers and as work picked up building a strong team became tough.

Many hot prospects had moved out of design or gone solo for lack of suitable jobs. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen this time round as the credit crunch kicks in.

Rising stars rarely get the recognition they deserve, though they may be the authors of award-winning work created in the name of their consultancies. In a bid to identify some of the best, we invited ten eminent practitioners from the five main areas of design – branding, interaction, interiors, product and graphics – to select designers who have caught their eye for exposure to Design Week readers.

This publication contains profiles of 14 rising stars nominated by our panel. As the year progresses we will identify others on our website, www.designweek.co.uk, so sign up for our In Depth online alerts if you want to keep abreast of them.

When this publication was conceived, we expected a bevy of fresh graduates to grace our pages. In the event, panellists have tended to go for a more experienced selection, often people working on their teams, sometimes in senior positions.

Does this mean than no one new of merit has emerged in recent years or that practitioners don’t get out as much as they ought to? We prefer to think it denotes a confidence in their teams that will help boost design’s creative standing and see us through whatever the economic downturn brings

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