It’s the CR archive: 448 print issues, from 1980 to 2018

CR’s new digital archive lets you browse and search every single issue of the magazine ever printed, from the very first to the very latest

By Patrick Burgoyne 04/04/2018 9:49 am

The first issue of Creative Review came out in May 1980. The cover (above) featured Terence Conran, posing proudly behind a packaging range for now defunct supermarket International, and stills from commercials for Renault, a COI seatbelt campaign, Richard Shops and Barclaycard, in which Dudley Moore played a rather middle-aged punk.

Inside the issue, as well as our Conran piece, John Webster wrote about the dangers of ad campaigns that relied on celebrities, while subsequent features bemoaned the dearth of long copy in ads (an issue that seems to have been raised almost constantly ever since), the decline in quality of radio ads (likewise), and the rising costs of making commercials. There was also a round-up of the latest posters and a piece on the growing globalisation of the ad business. And lots of ads for pens.

A spread from the first issue of CR. Every issue of the magazine is now available to subscribers via our archive

If any of these take your fancy you can now, thanks to our new digital archive, read them on your desktop or mobile.

As you can with every issue we’ve ever published. So if you want to read all the articles we have published on, say, Pentagram over the past 38 years, it’s all here.

“Pentagram is an arrogant design group” – from CR’s July 1980 issue

The first time we featured Neville Brody – here he is in our April 1984 issue and on the cover too.

Neville Brody feature from April 1984

Brody (top right) on the April 1984 cover

And you can trace how people, companies and trends have been covered over the years. The whole archive is searchable, results are displayed in context so that you can tell whether the term in question is a passing mention or the subject of a fully-fledged article.

‘Can the computer take the place of conventional art tools such as the airbrush?’ we asked in November 1983 (note the ironically placed ad for drawing boards, bottom right)

A prediction from Dec 03

From our April 2017 issue on AI

And you can download PDFs of every page (for your personal use, of course).

From today, all of this will be available as part of a CR subscription. If you are already a subscriber, you can access the archive free of charge for the remainder of your sub. For everyone else, it is available as part of our new subscriber packages, details of which you can find here.

Thus armed, you can even re-enact our finest moment – the time that CR was featured in an episode of Mr Bean (watch from 6:30 on). April 1995 issue, if you’re wondering.