My favourite covers from Artistic Evaluation
Creative Review has gone through many looks in its 40 year history. Here, the art director of the magazine, Paul Pensom, examines how the design of the magazine has changed over time, while maintaining the characteristic square shape.
MARCH 1, 1988 – ART DIRECTOR: PAUL HARPIN
Creative Review Magazine was launched in the spring of 1980 as a slim quarterly supplement for readers of Centaur Media's sister title Marketing Week. Launch designer Bob Bateman created a multi-part cover grid with images from five floors. This approach was largely followed in the 1980s.
This cover by Paul Harpin, who took over the management in July 1987, offers an exclusive overview of color use in the creative industry and is the first time that the strictly functional cover grid has been selected
the service of a more conceptual idea.
The multi-panel grid remained in increasingly fragmented form until 1992, but from that point on, the covers became more playful, broke frames, prioritized certain palettes, and abandoned conventional image selection in favor of esoteric graphics, which were often taken out of context from their original use.
DECEMBER 2, 1994 – ART DIRECTOR: GARY COOK
In 1988 Paul Harpin introduced a new logo that retained the distinctive "Photo Cropper" arrangement (which would have been immediately known to the CR audience), but enlarged the wordmark's real estate and replaced the now dated Advertisers Gothic with the much more powerful Franklin Gothic Heavy.
Colin McHenry became Art Director in 1990, and was succeeded by Gary Cook, who redesigned the magazine in the mid-1990s. Cook finally gave up the multi-panel legacy of the 1980s and ushered in an era of increasingly inventive single-topic covers, including specially commissioned artworks (until then covers were almost exclusively drawn from the magazine's existing material).
This 1994 edition is a fine example of breaking through the fourth wall and comes from the promising-sounding source material from an advertising campaign for Tennent's camp.