In 2018, six graphic design students at Falmouth University — Alex Bassett, Connor Edwards, Dylan Young, Reuben Morley, Tom Heath, and Paul Merritt — kept noticing the same thing: their desktops were littered with fragments. Unfinished experiments from workshops, odd images from abandoned projects, bits that hadn't survived client presentations. The work was good, sometimes better than the polished finals, but it had nowhere to go. So they made it a home. ICBQ launched as a graphic design magazine with a premise so counterintuitive it bordered on radical: only work that had been rejected, unused, or abandoned would appear in its pages.
The first issues featured the founders' own creative offcuts, but as word spread — through magCulture, It's Nice That, Stack Magazines — the submissions broadened. By issue five, themed around "Freedom" and released in late 2020, ICBQ was publishing unused work from the Yarza Twins, Happy Little Accidents, Jun Lin, and a growing roster of both emerging and established designers. Each feature was designed independently, responding to its own content within a fixed set of typographic constraints, giving the magazine a visual rhythm that felt spontaneous without being chaotic. The editors experiment freely with paper stocks and print processes within a consistent format of 215 × 295 mm — a discipline that Revue Faire, one of their key inspirations, would recognise.
What makes ICBQ more than a novelty is its editorial spine. The magazine runs three types of content: unused work presented as visual portfolios, unused photography given room to breathe, and brief first-person accounts of designers' early encounters with rejection. Stack Magazines described the opening editorial of one issue as an anatomy of failure, noting that rejection activates the same neural pathways as physical pain. The magazine's response to that fact is not sympathy but celebration — the conviction that creative work abandoned by one context may be the most interesting thing in another. All six founders now work full-time as graphic designers in studios across the UK, producing ICBQ in evenings and weekends over Slack, which makes its careful production all the more impressive.
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