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Creative Review sells its soul…

As posted previously, the February issue of Creative Review has been ‘sold’ to ad agency Mother. For £15,000 Mother have bought the right to run both the content and design of the issue, working alongside the in-house team. The issue comes in a brown paper bag and the cover design, above, features a real sticker. Other extras include a sticker based on a sign found in Soho by Peter Saville (This is not a brothel…, shown below) and two A1 posters, one by artist Adam Dant and another by Mother.

If the cover seems a little obvious, the sample spreads, below, show how the sticker theme runs through the content, and how different, overall, the issue looks. Regular art director Nathan Gale comments. ‘It’s not what you could normally do on the magazine as it’s very much a one-off and doesn’t have to work issue after issue. It’s not as “considered” as we would normally have to be and is much more about instant impact’. In a curious example of the difference between the worlds of advertising and publishing, the whole magazine was created in Illustrator as Mother don’t use Quark.

Here’s the intro spread, featuring a Dan Tobin Smith image of what a pure human soul might look like and asking the question ‘How much can you sell before you’ve sold out?’

Interview with Peter Saville about selling out (the theme develops!)

Saville’s sticker – one in very copy!

At what point are you selling out? Which side of the line does a campaign to promote North Korea fall?

Other content includes: a piece on Tom Waits by Barney Hoskyns and how he never allows his music to be used on ads and has made millions by sueing those who do; an interview with AC Grayling on ethics in design and advertising; an interview with Oontje Oxenaar, designer of the most beautiful money ever made – the Dutch Guilder; and a piece on awards and what agencies spend on them – the image is of a shelf of awards made to look like sex toys (it’s all about self-gratification).

Judging by these few pages, the issue looks great and the content promises a lot more than the usual guest-editorship gimmick. But can the actual magazine live up to it? We’ll see next week when the issue hits the stores.