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The top 50 - When it comes to design, the UK is home to some of the world's biggest talent. But who are the brightest stars? We put together a panel of judges to identify the hottest names. Here they are ...
Thorsten van Elten
A Pigeon Light is for life, not just for Christmas, believes Van Elten. He expects customers to treat the dinky, bird-shaped lamps - or anything stocked by his quirky London boutique - with as much care as a household pet. "We've slightly lost track of what stuff costs. Everybody should buy less, but buy better," says the German-born retailer, 39, who founded his homewares label in 2002. As a buyer for furniture store SCP, Van Elten felt many good designs weren't making it to the market due to the paucity of British manufacturing. So, with his own capital, he decided to batch-produce in the UK such items as Alexander Taylor's charming Antler coat hook and Dominic Wilcox's War Bowl, made from a troop of half-melted toy soldiers.
Saluted for investing in young British talent, Van Elten maintains he is a "producer", not a manufacturer ("I don't have any factories"). "Secret Santa syndrome" - irresponsible splurging on cheap, throwaway gifts - is one of his bugbears. "When people say they've saved up to buy a Pigeon Light, which, at £55, is quite a lot for some, that's the greatest pleasure for me," he explains. Thus far, with nearly 10,000 having flown the coop, Ed Carpenter's Perspex birds are Van Elten's biggest hit.
After making his name with light-hearted accessories, he is now releasing more sober furniture, such as Taylor's Outline shelving. "Bringing personality to little things is easy, but humorous furniture is quite a statement," he says. "While I don't mind funny cushions, I wouldn't want a funny sofa."
Tom Dixon
Self-taught and outspoken, Dixon maintains the air of a maverick, despite his OBE for services to British design. As creative director at Habitat he has reissued classics by Verner Panton and Robin Day, and introduced his own designs, such as the stackable Jack Light. Today he works with Finnish furniture manufacturer Artek, as well as under his own brand (Copper Shade pendant).
Kerr Noble
"We're a bit like detectives," says Amelia Noble of the fastidious approach she and Frith Kerr - and their small company - favour in their graphic design work. "We start each job with research, which we love because we're both a bit swottish." Whether crafting their own letterforms or hunting for the perfect fonts at London's archaic St Bride printing library, the pair are very generous with their time - commissioned to design business cards for one company, they made each staff member a set of 12. "It doesn't always make business sense, but it keeps us alive," says Noble.
Kerr and Noble, 33 and 34 respectively, met at the Royal College of Art when they jointly won a competition. They set up their own company in 1997 months after graduating, and now employ two senior designers - Noble's sister, Marianne and Julia Castillo - and junior designer Johanna Bonnevier, attracting both heavyweight clients, including Channel 4, and small independents, such as London grocer Melrose & Morgan. At present they are working on the branding for a series of modern coaching inns for Dhillon hotels; and the graphics and book for the Barbican Art Gallery's forthcoming over 18s-only exhibition Seduced: Art & Sex From Antiquity To Now.
Ab Rogers
There's always plenty going on in Ab Rogers' spaces. In London's Topshop, he marched handbags and shoes around the store. Elsewhere, he made mannequins fly up and down a three-storey atrium. Most recently, in London store Emperor Moth, he placed on the walls 300 mirrors, which bounce fragmented views of the clothes back at you from every angle. Welcome to Rogers' world: glossy and futuristic, colourful, kinetic and technological.
Rogers, 39, was "marinated in design as a kid" (his father is architect Richard Rogers). Since setting up his own practice he has garnered clients across the world. Right now he's designing the first retrospective of his father's work, for the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Rogers found it "very off-putting at the beginning of my career" being the son of a famous father. Now it's "healthy and helpful. I now have the confidence to embrace it".
Daniel Brown
When Brown designed his first website in 1997, it caused a storm - so much so that three years later it was archived by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. A playful, emotional piece of design, noodlebox.com was one of the first sites out of the blocks.
Without his innovations in the early days of the internet, the web would be a duller place today. He was one of the first to soften the sterile aesthetics of early websites using nature-inspired, sensual imagery. Brown, now 30, is still as experimental as ever. He has replaced noodlebox.com with play-create.com, where he posts his own and other designers' work, and is pioneering "generative design" - his Software As Furniture uses projectors and plasma screens to create ever-changing wallpaper.
Elsewhere, he runs fashion photographer Nick Knight's website, showstudio.com, and has designed an installation for the University of Sunderland's Design 4 Science touring exhibition, which sheds light on the principle of cell division. Brown has been intrigued by computers since he was a small child, admitting when he was awarded the Design Museum's Designer of the Year prize in 2004 that he owed much of his talents to a misspent youth in front of an Atari ST.
Ken Adam
He's given us fibreglass volcanoes and submarine-swallowing ships: the designer of seven James Bond films, plus a host of other classics from Dr Strangelove to The Madness Of King George, Adam - born Klaus Hugo Adam in Berlin in 1921 - is still going strong, designing video games, "even though I don't have a computer". "Well, design is design," he says.
Derek Birdsall
Pirelli calendars and the 2000 Common Book Of Worship may seem an unholy alliance but these two projects bookend the career of graphic designer Birdsall. Along the way he has created some classic Penguin covers, and has recently written Notes On Book Design to pass on his knowledge.
Thomas Heatherwick
Confusion reigns over how to label Heatherwick - is he a sculptor, civil engineer, or public artist? His projects - the Rolling Bridge in London's Paddington Basin, the B of the Bang sculpture in Manchester - are the product of a very singular vision. Since his 1994 window display for Harvey Nichols - a ribbon of wood that appeared to plunge in and out of the building's facade - his projects have demanded attention, not least his latest, the East Beach Cafe in Littlehampton.
Julia Lohmann
Lohmann had an epiphany at the butchers. "I saw these stomachs hanging up, and some had this amazing nodular texture, and others were like translucent honeycomb. They were really mesmerising." She took the lesson literally - the beguiling spheres of her Flock lights are made from 50 preserved sheep stomachs. By using meat-industry off-cuts, the 29-year-old UK-based German is messing with our heads. "I like taking a material we commonly discard and making it so beautiful that the viewer is instantly attracted to it, but only later finds out what it is."
Nobody could forget, however, that the upholstery of her Cow Bench was once rawhide. Stretched over a reconstituted foam frame, hand-sculpted to mimic a bovine torso, the leather occupies the same position as it would on the living animal. Sitting on one, you feel their artificial ribs. The prototype caused a stampede of interest at the 2005 Milan furniture fair, and about 20 benches have now been produced. Lohmann gives each a name - Carla, Elsa, Rosel et al - and designs to order for around £10,000.
Her latest creation is Lasting Void - a set of 12 stools cast from the cavity left after an animal's internal organs are removed. When not exposing consumer squeamishness, Lohmann runs Studio Bec, a graphic design agency, with her husband, Gero Grundmann. Yet it's her products that impress most - you won't look at a sheepskin rug in the same way again.
Timorous Beasties
2004's noirish Glasgow Toile wallpaper, with drunks and vagrants lurking in an apparently bucolic scene, at a stroke reinvented wallpaper and led a revolution in decoration. The design duo - Paul Simmons and Alistair McAuley - have just launched Devil Damask, another innocent-at-first-glance fabric with a sinister side, and opened their first London store.
Jonathan Ive
A million commuters have Ive to thank. After college, Ive joined London design group Tangerine, designing everything from combs to televisions. He then joined Apple in 1992 - and has since given us the iMac, the iPod, the PowerBook G4, the iMac G5 ... Ive is now Apple's senior vice-president of design.
Lucienne Day
The abstract fabrics designed by Day in the 50s and 60s couldn't be more desirable today, and have been reissued. Her work embodies the idealistic and democratic principles of Modern design - from her fabrics for Heal's in the 50s to her consultancy work for John Lewis in the 80s.
London Underground
Design associated with the tube has given us many pieces of great design - not least Harry Beck's groundbreaking tube map itself. London Underground now does a roaring trade in tube-inspired products: Circle line flip-flops, anyone?
Williams Murray Hamm
The graphic design of Richard Williams, Richard Murray and Garrick Hamm appears on everything from supermarket bread to banks. The work, daringly for packaging design, often eschews the obvious - baked beans adorn Hovis' Great White loaf, and they photographed organic vegetables - roots and all - for Sainsbury's SO range.
Marc Newson
Boys' toys and funky shapes are London-based Australian Newson's bag. From the Lockheed Lounge - a chaise longue recast as a "giant blob of mercury" - to his concept jet, Kelvin40, his work soars to new heights of cool. Yet one of his greatest hits is a humble dish drainer.
David Pearson
Pearson has made the humble paperback covetable again. His covers for Penguin's Great Ideas series marry quotes with arresting typography, and the just-released Great Loves series employs botanical images to surprisingly edgy effect. The forthcoming Great Journeys series is just as collectable, as is the first of his freelance work for French publisher Zulma.
Jaime Hayon
Arriving in London from Barcelona in the middle of one of the dreariest summers in years has done nothing to dampen Hayon's enthusiasm. "It's exciting to be here. I met my girlfriend in Venice, we moved together to Barcelona, and now we decided to come somewhere for a new adventure."
Madrid-born Hayon's way of speaking is almost as ebullient as his work. Vases that resemble robots, sleek sideboards with mismatched spiral legs and a rocking chair shaped like a green chicken - his work is the perfect antidote to minimalism.
But Hayon, 32, is not afraid of the more mundane. He has just launched a range of baths and basins - called Artquitect - on spindly legs in glossy colours. He is quick to name a raft of designers whom he admires - the craziness of Jurgen Bey, the simplicity of Jasper Morrison - but it is artists such as Jeff Koons who really inspire Hayon. "I have so many ideas," he says of his future in London. "I'm dying to do a sculpture in the city, and I'm getting into architecture - I'll learn by doing it. We'll see."
Peter Saville
"We don't need to be encouraged to buy any more things," says Peter Saville, graphic designer and all-round cool cat. Fashion brands are the worst, he says. Yet fashion advertising is where he made his mark in the 80s and 90s, creating work for brands including Givenchy and Stella McCartney. One groundbreaking campaign for Yohji Yamamoto in the early 90s featured no models or clothes, just stark slogans to express the disillusionment with the fashion world both he and his client shared at the time.
It's this anarchic approach, together with his album cover designs for Factory Records - particularly those for New Order and Joy Division - that have lent Saville, 52, a special status. At Factory, he was given a free hand, using whatever happened to be obsessing him at the time, and he played a key part in Manchester's regeneration. Today he lives and works in a single warehouse space in east London. His occasional forays into commercial work "to pay the rent" include the Kate Moss at Topshop brand identity. Yet his most recent incarnation, as creative director of Manchester, barely features graphic design at all.
Linda Andersson
She may be one of the few women in automotive design, but gender is not the key to Andersson's work. "You need women as well as men in the car industry to cover all aspects of design, but it's really about who you are as an individual," she says.
When Andersson, 30, designed the Ford PUNK for her final degree project, she discovered that for most people it's the feel rather than the look of the car that matters most. So she focused on the objects with which the driver has physical contact - the steering wheel, seat and gear stick - crucially, avoiding the "lipstick storage" gimmicks that feature in many all-female car projects.
Today Andersson's work is less about designing a specific steering wheel or gear stick - she is part of a team at Jaguar Advanced Design working on highly secret concepts to create products for the next 10 years. The biggest challenge the industry faces, she believes, is how to personalise cars, like mobile phones.
Troika
Don't call it design - call it "communication art". That's the approach of Troika, an art and design practice formed by Conny Freyer, Eva Rucki and Sebastien Noel in 2003. Projects include the SMS Guerrilla Projector, which projects text messages in public spaces, and Newton, the first computer-virus-as-art.
Jurgen Bey
Bey made his name as part of the renowned Droog Design collective, typifying its postmodern style with sight gags and lateral thinking - take his Trunk Bench, a log merged with three traditional chair backs. He often works with found objects.
Jamie Hewlett
With his Manga-inspired illustration - and Tank Girl - Hewlett was already a 90s name, but it was a flat-share with Damon Albarn that sparked the first-ever virtual, cartoon band, Gorillaz. Most recently he has designed the sets, costumes and animated sections of Albarn's opera project Monkey: Journey To The West, which premiered in Manchester this summer.
arts.guardian.co.uk · published 1 September 2007 - Profiles by Ros Anderson, Oliver Bennett, Victoria Brookes, Richard Clayton, Clare Dowdy, Trish Lorenz and Jill Macnair.
