London Design Festival 2017
So there it was, another year of the London Design Festival that brought the city of London alive with design and events to mark all the creative people that call London home and for those that journey to this amazing city.
In its 15th year, the festival ran from the 16-24 September during which the city opens up its streets and venues to thousands of designers, organisations and companies to show their latest offerings or even how they go about creating their unique items.
The main trade shows and exhibitions during these nine days are 100% Design, London Design Fair and Design Junction.
100% Design
First stop this year was 100% Design which was held at London Olympia exhibition centre in Kensington, just down the road from the Design Museum and always a great space with plenty of light and room to move around.
The show caters to the design professionals within the industry and is divided into five sections: Emerging Brands, Kitchens, Bedrooms & Bathrooms, Design & Build, Workplace and finally Interiors.
Depending on which part of the creative industry you're in you may prefer certain sections to others. To be honest this year didn't seem as ground breaking as it has been in previous years, nothing revolutionary seemed to be on offer but it is always nice to walk around and see what brands are up to.
Design Junction
Next stop was Design Junction which was held in Kings Cross, where there seems to be a lot of development going on at the moment, enough so that Tom Dixon Studio will be moving to a new location in Kings Cross.
Set across a few buildings the first stop was the U.A.L exhibition which is always an interesting event to see what graduate minds are coming up with. After that we headed into The Canopy which is a temporary pop up retail space for some amazing brands which offers products from stationery all the way through to jewellery.
Finally was Cubitt House and Cubitt Park with the ground floor being dedicated to lighting and then on the first floor were leading brands that we all know and love.
Design Frontiers
These two events made up our Thursday which leads to Sunday when I headed to Design Frontiers at Somerset House for the first time and it was quite an exhibition of over 30 various designers from the creative world.
Starting off with the Kvadrat exhibition which featured 19 designers who had to use Canvas 2 to create a wonderful and playful item.
Jaguar also featured their design process with an in house designer showing how they went about designing various components that make up a car.
Benjamin Hubert from Layer Design Studio also had two projects on offer, one was a new smartphone accessory line that went by the name Nolii as well as the collaboration with Allermuir on the new Axyl Collection.
Each project or designer had their own space to work with, so venturing from room to room increased the spontaneity of the event as you didn't know what would be next.
The mens fashion label Jijibaba is an evolving one where a community of designers create their own line, starting off with Jaime Hayon from Hayon Studio and Jasper Morrison, with both lines on show.
So the week has been very inspiring and as usual I look forward to the next events for the year and also what comes around in 2018.
I hope you have a great week ahead!
