How the World's Best-Known Architecture and Design Website Grew Up From a £20 Blog

"Creativity is in our DNA" — nonsense! How could it be? Creativity exists only in education and culture.

In 2006, Marcus Fairs, then 40, was fired by Icon, the design magazine he had helped found and which had just entered its fourth year. He was in two minds about starting another print title from scratch. He went to the older architecture magazine Blueprint and asked its founder what it would take to build a magazine as good as Blueprint from nothing. The answer: a manager with ideas, a group of capable writers, and at least £500,000.

Marcus never found the £500,000. He spent £10 on a domain name and another £10 (yes) to have a friend build a test version. The blog was called Dezeen.

Dezeen's first content was project material from architecture firms and drawings from designers. Marcus's designer friends had not even heard of a "blog" back then, and sent over their press kits half-convinced. Thomas Heatherwick, who would later design the "dandelion" British pavilion at the Shanghai Expo, told Marcus flatly: "You must be mad. Who would want to look at architectural drawings on a website?!"

Dezeen is a splice of the English words "design" and "magazine," yet to this day people still begin emails with "Dear Mr. Dezeen." "A lot of people assume there's a man called Dezeen who's our boss," Marcus said on March 17, looking back over the 12-year-old online magazine at the Design Republic · Design Celebration event in Shanghai. Today it is the world's best-known architecture and design website.

The "Golden Age" of Blogs

Apart from the older Designboom (founded in Italy in 1999), Dezeen was one of the first online magazines, and it emboldened the design and architecture platforms that followed, Archdaily among them. In an interview with QDaily, Marcus said that at the start they were like the scrambling homesteaders of the American West.

"People from print were used to a whole rhythm, slow and rigorous: find the story, write the story, hand it to an editor, then layout, proofreading, printing, and finally the newsstand. Suddenly all of that was compressed into what felt like a single click of the mouse."

Besides the traffic overloads that hit from time to time, Marcus and his colleagues also had to handle the site simply vanishing. The company they had first registered the domain with never reminded him to renew it; one day the site was gone, and an email arrived demanding £500 to "ransom" it back.

"When that happens, you have no time to argue," Marcus said, explaining his fixation on speed. Dezeen still files news at a sprint today.

The frontier ran to a city's infrastructure, too. Marcus once took his computer on holiday to an Italian town with no internet, and had to drive an hour to the nearest town that had it, finish editing there, and drive back.

"Now everyone has a phone and Wi-Fi comes as standard in a café. But a dozen years ago you had to drive to get 'near' the internet. Looking back, that's very strange, isn't it?"

Two months after Dezeen launched, the Design Museum in Britain, then preparing a solo show for Zaha Hadid, came looking for them: would they build a blog for the exhibition? Nobody expected that the blog would sell more tickets than every other channel combined.

"After that, people stopped wondering whether I was mad. Companies soon came knocking, wanting to run ads on the site. But at the time we didn't even know how to put an ad on a web page."

At the Miami design fair that same year, Marcus and his wife were invited to São Paulo to film a documentary about the Campana brothers. They bought the camera gear and the plane tickets on the spot, had no idea how to make a documentary, and the sound came out "pretty terrible." Once the edit was finished, the rough film became the only exhibit at that year's design week to use digital media. Nobody had time to argue about how finished it was; Marcus calls it the golden age of blogs and new technology.

"We Care About Brands, and About the People in the Trade Who Only Look Glamorous"

In its first few years Dezeen became known fast, but people questioned whether it could be trusted.

Marcus's early description of it sounded more like an ad agency: "We're good at telling stories. We can help designers and brands dig out their own stories and publish them through our platform." It looked like a shell assembled out of a great deal of instant information, with no view of its own.

"A lot of people knew me from the critical pieces I used to write in print. They knew me as a troublemaker, so what puzzled them was why I was content to serve up a platter of news."

Marcus says that was a deliberate choice at the beginning: stick to news and interviews, present the information itself, comment little. "I knew that one day we would do real journalism. But critical writing takes time, and we couldn't afford to wait. To be honest, we didn't even have the budget to pay writers."

The turn came at Milan Design Week in 2011, when Marcus and a scattering of other journalists started discussing on Twitter how young designers actually live.

The show floor belonged to the famous furniture brands, which used young designers' work to fill out their stands, catch the eye, or lend the brand some prestige, and the press praised those brands for encouraging innovation. In fact the great majority of the pieces on display would never go into production.

The discussion Twitter tagged #milanuncut drew in journalists and young designers, who accused Milan Design Week of becoming a monopoly platform. A young designer had to bring the work to Milan, sign a lopsided contract with a brand, stand next to the stand and pitch to passers-by. The lucky ones saw their piece produced, and the royalties they could collect came to 5% of the wholesale price the brand paid. If nobody was interested, the designer earned nothing at all from the "sample."

The Guardian interviewed a designer with a modest name, whose five pieces had all been picked up for production; in the previous year his royalties came to £600, enough for half a month's rent.

The questions Marcus and his colleagues put into the discussion included: are the contracts designers sign with brands fair? Is the royalty share right? Who takes most of the money? Is there a better way to help young designers start out?

The press itself became an object of their scrutiny. For years the media had been an accomplice in this "exploitation" inside the design world. "You notice everybody uses the same line on young designers: think of the exposure, think of the people you'll meet at the event…"

What pushed the Twitter argument deeper was traditional press such as The Guardian, which attacked the design royalty system laid down in the 1950s. Italian home design then aimed at the middle class and was made in volume, so a designer could earn a decent living from it. By 2011, after Chinese makers and mid- and low-price brands such as IKEA arrived, Italian furniture repositioned itself as a luxury good and cut output sharply.

In 2013, Dezeen reported on crowdfunding platforms, where designers could launch projects of their own. Marcus describes this as an attempt at decentralization: Milan Design Week was no longer the most important showcase, let alone the only one.

That piece ran in a new Dezeen section. Unlike the launch of a new product or the completion of a new building, the section, called Opinion, took on serious arguments.

"The numbers say it doesn't bring the site more traffic. But it gave us intellectual weight in the field."

"I'm a Journalist, Not a Designer"

The new section brought in a long list of contributors. Recent subjects include: opposing the wholesale demolition of Britain's postwar buildings; whether the Sony Tower on Madison Avenue in Manhattan, formerly the AT&T Building, is worth saving; how architects, in the name of making new places in cities, have become accomplices to "social cleansing"; and how the people allowed into the debate about the future planning of Los Angeles are almost all white architects, who cannot represent the city's diversity or what its people actually need.

The most recent debate Marcus and his colleagues started themselves is gender inequality in architecture. They asked many well-known firms to take part in a survey counting men and women at each level. "Of course architecture has women designers. But you find more women in the lower ranks, and the higher you go, the fewer there are."

"In Britain, the traditional press protests by launching a 'campaign' — 'we demand this bill be amended.' I don't like calling them campaigns. It sounds a bit old-fashioned, a bit solemn. We just call them agendas."

At last year's Dutch Design Week, Marcus organized a series of conversations, "Good Design for a Bad World," on five agendas: climate change, the refugee crisis, terrorism, pollution, and politics.

Some doubted this was a design week's proper business. Marcus's answer: "I'm a journalist, not a designer."

"Take the refugee question. Many designers believe design can solve the refugee crisis. But the solutions they come up with are life jackets made out of scrap, or an app to help you find relief supplies. Honestly, I have had enough. Their hearts are in the right place, but none of it helps at all!"

Marcus invited the manager of a refugee camp into the discussion. Refugees are not a "special group" and do not need "design for refugees"; like anyone else, most of them are educated and know their way around technology. "The problem now is that almost every policy assumes these refugees will eventually be repatriated, so almost all the design can only be temporary."

Marcus calls it the most exhausting project he has ever done. "The point isn't to propose solutions or draw plans. It's to ask where the limits of design are. Can design change anything? The answer may be yes, and it may be no."

"I understand that some new media no longer set much store by agenda setting. For me, that is still exactly what we want to do."

Q = QDaily

A = Marcus Fairs

Q: Your reading of Milan Design Week is interesting — you talk about who exhibits, and about new brands like Google and Instagram showing up alongside the traditional ones. Why does that matter?

A: People all over the world press me for my views on Milan. Let me ask you something first: do you really care about Milan? Why?

In 2013 I wrote a piece attacking Milan. Outside the fairground, what the city could offer was threadbare: hotel rates that shot up on every holiday, terrible public transport — I couldn't even read the metro map. Tourists poured in all at once, and I was standing in the rain waiting for taxis that never came. I used very harsh words, something like: "Visiting Milan during design week makes you feel the opposite of design everywhere you turn."

I was ill at the time. I admit it wasn't a neutral news report, it was an observer's essay. After it ran, the brands that had been good to me were quite disappointed; for years they had given me VIP passes, dinners, and gifts.

A month or so later, Claudio Luti, then president of Milan Design Week, asked me in for a talk. I was uneasy on the way, not knowing what I'd walk into, and then he said he agreed with me completely. He did take steps, working with hotels to hold down the rise in prices, and talking to people in the city about working together. He met with failure, went away for a while, and is back now.

Q: That's hard to imagine in China today, where many cities are eager to host every kind of creative event.

A: Looking back, it isn't fair to be hard on a city like that. It's an industrial city in northeastern Italy, not the prettiest, and the weather isn't much either. It's only because an important fair takes place there every year that people come from all over the world. The chaos is caused by too many outsiders arriving at once, which would test any city. It was never designed to meet those outsiders' needs.

Milan's government took a long time to change course, and the city is more "civilized" now. New York is the same. People once couldn't picture getting around New York by bike; it was a city occupied by cars, and it is becoming a place fit to live in.

The criticism then and the praise now are not information the exhibition halls can give you. I'm just an observer who comes back at the same time each year and slowly sees how it changes.

Q: Does that have to do with how much a city values its creative industries?

A: Of course. Milan is really only a furniture trade fair — bluntly, selling chairs, tables, and lamps. But once it reached a certain size and pulled in the design world from everywhere, it became interesting. The press and the design elite are all there. Every kind of brand can try to work out what is going on, not just the ones that make furniture but the new ones: Google, Apple, Uber, Instagram, Facebook. Their people are on the ground too, and this year Google and Instagram were exhibitors. They aren't laying out new products and telling you "look, here's our new phone." They are trying to join the conversation.

China cares more and more about creative industries. I don't know much about it, but the sheer number of events suggests so. In Britain the government pays less and less attention to them, cutting funding for the relevant university and college courses and discouraging students from applying. It still smells of Western arrogance: everything China makes is a knockoff or a fake, while we have created so many legendary brands, "creativity is in our DNA." Nonsense! How could it be? Creativity exists only in education and culture.

Cover image: Design Republic; Dezeen.com

About Design Republic · Design Celebration: the event ran from March 16 to March 25, 2018. It set out to use the strength of the design community to restate design's inclusiveness, its crossing of boundaries, and its inventiveness. Design Celebration made "cross-disciplinary collaboration projects" and "community" part of its programme, deepening Design Republic's character as an inventive, many-sided platform that argues for bringing together the four basics of life — clothing, food, shelter, and travel (culture) — in search of a better way to exchange ideas about modern living.