Launching the Emerging Creative Talent Magazine Awards

Supporting the next generation of print creatives through real industry opportunities.

It is so important to feed into the next generation of creatives, helping to keep talent in the North and giving young people real reasons to stay hungry for creative work.

This is why we have absolutely loved working with third-year Fashion Communication students from Northumbria University, seeing their progress, sharing our love of print and helping them stay inspired as they worked towards their final major projects.

It all began back in September 2025, when the students visited The Mag Room at Unique Magazines to browse our shelves, immerse themselves in the world of print and develop a campaign promoting our store and services. That first visit marked the beginning of what has become a fantastic partnership, and we’ve loved following their creative journeys ever since. 

Since then, we have followed their journeys closely as they moved towards their final project: designing, creating and printing their very own magazines.

After seeing the amount of hard work, thought and dedication that went into these publications, we wanted to do more than simply admire the finished work. We wanted to recognise it, support it and give some of these emerging creatives an opportunity to see their work exist beyond university.

And so, the Emerging Creative Talent Magazine Awards were born.

The awards are our way of celebrating and championing the next generation of creatives through collaboration, inspiration and real-world opportunities. They also tie closely into something we care deeply about at Unique Magazines: keeping print alive by supporting the people who will shape its future.

Choosing Our First Emerging Creative Talent Award Winners

We began by reading through every magazine the students had created, looking at everything from design, photography and styling to content, themes and ideas.

But there was one main question we kept coming back to:

Could we see this being published and stocked in our store?

After some very intense reading and a lot of discussion, we were genuinely blown away by what the students had created.

Narrowing the publications down was not easy, but eventually two stood out as our winner and runner-up.

Runner-Up: Lois Dawson with Common Ground

Our runner-up was Lois Dawson with her publication, Common Ground.

Common Ground reflects and celebrates working-class life through fragments of family, friendship and local culture. It documents everyday environments and explores how identity is shaped by place and lived experience.

The publication centres closely on Teesside, the area Lois grew up in, exploring unique stories and her family’s experiences of growing up working class.

We felt that Lois’s focus on local, working-class people connected so closely with everything we try to promote here at Unique Magazines. We are passionate about making print and creative opportunities feel accessible to everyone, and Common Ground felt honest, personal and rooted in real experiences.

As runner-up, Lois will have five copies of Common Ground professionally printed and stocked in our store.

For a student project to become a physical magazine that customers can discover, pick up and buy is exactly the kind of opportunity we wanted these awards to create.

Winner: Abbie Reardon with Hot Mess

In first place, we chose Abbie Reardon with her publication, Hot Mess.

The magazine had already been shortlisted for the Terry Mansfield Fashion Publication Award 2026 at Graduate Fashion Week in London, and when we saw it, it was easy to understand why.

Abbie created all of the photography herself, which was outstanding, alongside an incredible 104 pages of content exploring life in your twenties.

From the moment we picked it up, we felt that Hot Mess would be completely at home in The Mag Room. It stood confidently alongside the highly popular independent magazines we already stock, both in the quality of its design and the strength of its ideas.

Its themes of creativity, identity and growth also felt incredibly relevant to us and to so much of what we are passionate about at Unique Magazines.

From the editorial and interviews to the photography, content and even the advertisements dotted throughout, Hot Mess felt like a fully established independent print publication.

Getting it professionally printed and onto our shelves felt like a no-brainer.

We were delighted to present Abbie with our first Emerging Creative Talent Magazine Award and share the news with Lois that copies of Common Ground would also be professionally printed and stocked in our store.

We then attended the students’ final exhibition, saw their finished work displayed, watched the fashion show showcasing garments created throughout their time at university and said a few words as official partners.

It felt like a brilliant way to celebrate everything they had achieved.

Taking Student Work Beyond a Grade

By printing and stocking these publications, we hope to help bridge the gap between a university project and the creative industry.

These magazines will no longer exist only as final major projects or pieces of work created for a grade. They will exist in a real retail setting, where customers can pick them up, browse their pages and discover ideas from new creatives who are only just beginning their careers.

For Abbie and Lois, it creates real industry experience for their portfolios and gives them something tangible to feel proud of after years of hard work.

For us, it is a chance to play a small part in keeping print alive.

If we want magazines and physical media to continue to grow, we need to support the people who are excited to create them. We need to give new ideas somewhere to be seen, new voices somewhere to be heard and emerging talent opportunities that exist beyond the classroom.

This is only the beginning for the Emerging Creative Talent Magazine Awards.

Following the success of our first Emerging Creative Talent Magazine Awards, we are now expanding the programme across universities throughout the Northeast, giving even more students the opportunity to have their creativity recognised and their work showcased in a real retail environment. 

We want to help create real opportunities, celebrate new ideas and inspire the next generation to see a future for themselves in print and the creative industries.

This is only the beginning, and we cannot wait to see which emerging creatives and new publications we can help bring to life next.