The first issue of Creative Review appeared in spring 1980 as a slim quarterly insert for readers of Centaur Media's sister title, Marketing Week. The launch designer, Bob Bateman, created a multi-panel cover grid featuring images from five stories — a functional format that would persist, in increasingly fragmented form, until 1992. The founding editor, Torin Douglas, came from Design magazine at the Design Council, and his appointment was deliberate: the publication would not be another advertising trade journal but something broader, covering the full spectrum of commercial creativity from design consultancies to ad agencies to photographers and typographers.
Within a year, the supplement had become a standalone monthly. Under a succession of editors — Jeremy Myerson from 1984, Lewis Blackwell from 1986, Patrick Burgoyne from 1999, and current editor Eliza Williams — Creative Review tracked the seismic shifts in the creative industries: the design boom of the early 1980s, the rise of digital media in the 1990s, the launch of Design Week as a spin-off, the introduction of a CD-ROM supplement in 1996, and the full website launch in 2009. Burgoyne's two-decade tenure defined the magazine's modern identity, introducing themed issues, the annual Creative Review Awards, and a Photography Annual that became a benchmark for the industry.
In July 2017, the magazine went bimonthly — six issues per year — a recognition that print had to become an event rather than a routine. In 2025, Centaur Media sold Creative Review to Haymarket Media Group, placing it alongside Campaign and PRWeek in a portfolio of creative and marketing titles. The move gave the brand new infrastructure while preserving the editorial independence that has sustained it for four decades. Through all the ownership changes, format shifts, and industry upheavals, the mission articulated in the first issue has never changed: to celebrate the best in creativity, wherever it appears and whoever makes it.
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