Icon’s Guide To
The Best of London Design Festival
14–22 September 2019
The Icon Design Guide brings you cutting-edge, forward-thinking design events throughout London Design Festival (LDF).
Since 2004, the Icon Design Guide has been the essential guide for visitors to LDF, celebrating the best exhibitions, talks, and installations across London.
From lighting and furniture, to textiles and technology, LDF showcases the best of London's creative industries at showrooms and venues throughout the week.
Compiled by ICON Magazine’s editorial team, the pocket-sized guide is packed with design highlights, picking out the must-see exhibitors from the wide array on offer.
Pick up a copy of the guide at participating events and exhibitions during London Design Festival from 14th - 22nd September 2019.
The Icon Design Trail is a curated guide to the best of the London Design Festival, tracing a carefully chosen route through exhibitions, showrooms, talks and installations across the capital. Rather than attempting to list everything, it selects the events worth crossing town for, spanning furniture, lighting, textiles and technology. The result is a pocket-sized companion that helps visitors plan their week with confidence and spend their time in the right rooms.
The guide has been an essential companion to festival visitors for well over a decade, compiled by the editorial team of a design magazine with long-standing ties to the creative industries. Its editorial eye matters: each included event is picked for genuine quality and relevance, so the trail feels focused rather than overwhelming. For anyone new to the festival, or returning after many editions, it offers a shortcut to the stands, launches and conversations that define the week.
London Design Festival transforms the city for its annual run in September, opening up showrooms, galleries, studios and other venues to the public for a concentrated week of creative activity. Visitors can move between trade-only spaces and public installations in a single day, encountering brands at their stands and makers in conversation. The Icon Design Trail organises that abundance into a legible itinerary, so a day out in the capital becomes a considered sequence of highlights rather than a series of fortunate detours.
Design events in London often reward those who linger. A showroom viewing, a product launch or a scheduled talk can be more rewarding than the headline exhibition, and the guide is careful to surface the secondary moments alongside the marquee names. Independent designers, anniversary celebrations and anniversary showcases sit comfortably next to established brands, giving the trail an inclusive tone. It is a guide that values the whole ecosystem of London design, not only its most visible names.
The aesthetic of the guide reflects the values it promotes: warm, editorial and human. Generous spacing, soft blush-pink panels, a deep magenta accent and a classic book serif give the pages an editorial calm, while photography of hands, materials and people keeps the emphasis on craft and making. Rounded, pill-shaped buttons and flat, shadow-free cards keep the reading experience uncluttered. The presentation mirrors the subject: thoughtful, precise and quietly confident.
The trail is also a route through the social side of design. Talks, presentations and installations invite visitors to meet the people behind the products, and the guide's timings and venue notes help make those conversations easier to fit into a busy festival schedule. Because the festival spreads across so many venues and districts, having a recommended sequence removes much of the guesswork. A visitor can follow the trail, arrive at each event informed, and leave the week with a fuller sense of the creative industries.
