Milton Keynes celebrates creativity with new poster exhibition across the city

"One thing I love about Milton Keynes is how easy and enjoyable it is to run around. My poster takes inspiration from one of many runs alongside a local legend: the Grand Union Canal. What I hope UK City of Culture status will achieve is growing recognition, engagement and investment in the local efforts being made on the ground by local creative individuals and communities."

“The smiley was born in the same decade (1960s) as the ground was broken for the building of our city. The smiley and our city’s parallels continue over the decades, with each of their respective design rationales being for the benefit of the people, for the benefit of our happiness. Each has morphed and stretched and held space for cultures to gather around and find joy within. 

"The smiley and our city are kindred, simple forms, in which multitudes of identities can find themselves. The smiley and our city are shorthand. The smiley and our city are pre-digital natives, reborn at the millennium for the Digital Age. The smiley and our city are newly discovered by each generation. The smiley and our city, if it weren’t obvious already, are just getting started.”

"1967 marked the founding of Milton Keynes and the birth of a new town. This design celebrates that defining year. The numerals featured were found, photographed and digitised from locations across the city, each rooted in its visual language. Together, they form a graphic interpretation of 1967 that’s personal to Milton Keynes, whilst reflecting the diverse and collective community that has shaped our city."

“I’ve always been interested in noticing the little creatures I come across when I’m out walking, whether on the streets, along the paths, or in the parks. After living in MK, I started to see how much these creatures are part of the city. For me, they bring a sense of joy and make the city feel more alive. You might be walking along and suddenly come across one, turning an ordinary moment into something a little more special. Many of them have been here for years, quietly living alongside the city."

"Creatures of Milton Keynes is my way of bringing these little characters together and sharing how I see the city as someone who came from outside the city and now lives here. I also see the project as an opportunity to celebrate a side of Milton Keynes that can easily go unnoticed. If MK achieves City of Culture status, I hope projects like this can contribute to a wider sense of local identity, encouraging people to look at familiar places in a new way, while also showing how artists and communities from different backgrounds can contribute to the story of the city.”

"My background is typographic design so it was natural for me to approach it like this. I wanted to explore a way of expressing the city’s diversity, bold characteristics and retro heritage with the mixture of typeface styles and colours. It also needed to feel celebratory and positive. I think it represents the strong identity of Milton Keynes.

"If MK won the bid, I think it would give the people of the city a powerful way of coming together to celebrate the diversity of its culture across the city and wider areas. I would hope that it empowers the younger generations to feel positive about the place they call home and to be proud of it. It’s also an opportunity for the city to transform the perceptions of people across the UK and to ultimately visit the city and celebrate it with. us."

"My poster is a hand-drawn tribute to my nephews: the next generation of MK citizens. My hope is for MK to continue expanding as a cultural playground, so everyone who lives and grows up here can discover what they're creatively capable of and embrace the city even more as their own."

"I wanted to turn the letters of 'We're just getting started' into a bold and eye-catching illustration that captures the energy and variety of Milton Keynes. Each letter becomes a space to explore a different aspect of the city."

“Because Milton Keynes was masterplanned on a grid to scale, I used Swiss minimalism to translate that physical architecture into a typographic concept. The baseline grid directly mirrors the city's 'H' and 'V' road network, using modular blocks to map MK's identity. It links heritage like Bletchley's codebreakers with local staples like the Concrete Cows and Redways. Geometric typography connects our computing history to a smart-city future, while raw concrete brown pairs with electric pink to represent vibrant culture taking over the infrastructure.

"Securing City of Culture status would be an incredible opportunity to spotlight Milton Keynes’ unique identity beyond the usual clichés. It would celebrate our rich heritage, champion our growing creative community, and show how our iconic modernist design continues to inspire new, forward-looking ideas.”

“MK Central Library was the first thing that came to mind when I think of what culture means to me growing up in Milton Keynes. My parents took me and my brother there every Friday. We’d borrow all the Goosebumps and Animorphs books and play Encarta MindMaze on the computers. It’s where I was first exposed to local artists Boyd and Evans’ work, and the giant ladies in André Wallace’s The Whisper. It’s great to have a reason to paint its rust-coloured bricks and colonnade.”

“I like to think about MK as a place of optimism, where you (as an artist/creative/resident/visitor) have space to think and explore both ideas and the city itself. The city is young and has so much potential as a centre for culture. The early vision of the city is one of innovation, where new ways of thinking meet folklore, where concrete and glass meet grass and trees.

“The poster I made for MK City of Culture 2029 nods to MK's early advertising campaign of the red balloons, borrowing an image from the campaign taken in The National Bowl and playing with it digitally.  For me MK City of Culture 2029 is an opportunity for MK to find that original spirit of the city, develop the cultural infrastructure for more new ideas to be supported.”

“Milton Keynes gets written off a lot: too young, too planned, too many roundabouts. A city of grids and concrete cows, not culture. We think that's exactly backwards, and as a Milton Keynes studio, we would say that. 

"We started simply, much like the city itself: create a grid, make it easy to navigate, and ensure people get straight to The Point. Placemaking is about pointing to the here and now. Planting a flag and saying this is us, this is where we are. The arrows do that literally. They're directional, they carry movement, and they give the posters a restlessness that suits a city finally sure of its own position and where it wants to go next. A city that can shift, change direction and adapt."