Ones to Watch 2016: Art director Jamie Andrew Reid

Right at the beginning of last year, Essex boy Jamie Andrew Reid wowed us with his beautiful book about skinhead culture. Drawing together essays, imagery and other archive material, it used a custom typeface and a sensitive design approach to showcase the significance of an oft-understood subculture, and proved Jamie to be a superlatively proactive designer to keep an eye on. Then in the summer, it was announced that Jamie was the new art director for Dazed. He saw the magazine through a total design overhaul, no mean feat for someone who only graduated only four years ago.

“Dazed is an evolving project, it needs a lot of time and attention so that’s my main output,” says Jamie. “Next year I’ll be strengthening that and carrying on with all my other collaborations I’m working on at the moment.”

Jamie’s other projects include designing a book for publisher Dashwood and ongoing work with fashion designers Claire Barrow, Grace Wales Bonner and Liam Hodges. Luckily for Jamie, none of this ever feels like hard work.

“I always feel personal fulfilment from all the work I do, whether that’s on a small scale or on a large scale like Dazed. Grace and Claire and anyone I work with are people I really believe in, who have a great vision. Working with people like that, we have similar tastes and ideas, so it’s really fulfilling to collaborate and see how things turn out.”

Since joining Dazed, Jamie’s found himself doing a hell of a lot of travelling – something that looks set to only increase in the new year. When we meet in early December, he’s already fitting in a trip to LA and one to New York before Christmas. Sounds exhausting, and with a schedule and portfolio like his, we’d suspected he was someone with a bursting Filofax of future plans. But it turns out things are a lot more organic than that. “I don’t have a particular idea of what I want to do [in 2016] at the moment, but things always come up anyway,” says Jamie. “I’m lucky to be surrounded by people who I can have discussions with and we can find interesting ideas together and pursue them, so it works out quite well.

“The work I do with Dazed feeds into work with other people and vice versa, so the visual research I’m doing all the time channels into everything. I find it quite hard to project into the future, I like to focus on the thing at hand and then the opportunity comes naturally.”