Katy Cowan

Katy Cowan focuses on how creative work travels from studio to audience, championing artists, designers and brands that shape contemporary visual culture. As founding editor and a leading writer at Creative Boom, she covers art, design and visual culture across news, inspiration and insight pieces for the creative industry. She launched the platform in 2009 and has since built it into a magazine, podcast and community that reaches around a million people each month, with thousands of articles under her byline.

Art, design and visual culture

Cowan’s core beat is contemporary art and design, with regular coverage of illustration, photography and publishing that spotlights both emerging and established names. Recent pieces profile illustrators such as Carolina Moscoso, whose architectural training informs her drawings, and Mike Gibbie, who turned love and loss into a children’s book series starring his own family. She reports on photography projects and awards, including series of children in costume against post-industrial Welsh landscapes and British photographers shortlisted for the Sony World Photography Awards. Her art and culture coverage ranges from new paintings by Peter Harris that explore the machinery of modern cities to exhibitions celebrating figures like Norman Cornish and Joan Cornellà. Across these stories, she keeps attention on the visual language of the work and the human stories behind it, bringing out intent and craft rather than only the headline image.

Advertising, branding and immersive campaigns

Cowan covers entertainment-facing campaigns where design, branding and experience intersect, from major brand refreshes to playful stunts in public space. Her branding stories include work such as Instagram’s first brand refresh in ten years, with a new wordmark and three typefaces, and identity projects for institutions like Stadtmuseum Berlin and IWM London.

She writes on campaigns that turn everyday objects into spectacle, including a ten-foot ball of real human hair rolling through New York and a non-alcoholic wine brand that channels Memphis design, Devo and Barbara Kruger in its packaging. Advertising coverage extends to purpose-led and niche initiatives, such as Visit Sweden’s travel agency for introverts and Faith In Nature’s “Bees R Good” TV ad that reworks a 1990s rave anthem. Her piece on a fully stocked corner store floating in Toronto’s harbour shows the same interest in immersive, shareable experiences that blur lines between retail, installation and entertainment.

Across this strand of her work, she emphasises concept, audience experience and creative collaborators, making campaigns intelligible to both industry insiders and those outside the marketing world.

Exhibitions, photography and cultural events

Exhibition reporting is a constant in Cowan’s archive, covering galleries, biennials and museum shows across contemporary painting, illustration and mixed media. Examples include group shows like New Mythologies, featuring artists such as Eileen Cooper, John Copeland and Iris Schomaker, and solo exhibitions from artists including David Batchelor and Norman Cornish.

She highlights photography retrospectives and orbiting stories, from Nat Finkelstein’s images of Andy Warhol’s circle to Coco Dávez’s “Faceless” portraits paying tribute to her idols. Her guides to creative conferences and festivals in the UK and Ireland sit alongside coverage of event routes and public art trails, such as Stanley Chow’s giant inflatable Manchester icons filling a shopping centre.

These pieces frame exhibitions and events as part of a wider creative ecosystem, situating artists and curators within ongoing conversations in art and design.

Creative industry, careers and community

Beyond individual projects, Cowan writes extensively about the realities of creative work, careers and community. She publishes practical freelance advice drawn from leading creatives, aimed at helping readers run better independent businesses.

Her “Dear Boom” and tips features address issues such as being ghosted by clients, handling difficult feedback and deciding whether to rebrand oneself, mapping the emotional and strategic challenges of creative practice. In reportage and interviews, she profiles founders and organisers, such as Victoria Montgomery and Tamira Hamden and their work building Women in Brand, to show how new networks and initiatives reshape the industry.

Her editorial reflections, including a year-in-review on how 2025 changed how we work and the Sweet Sixteen piece on running Creative Boom, trace the evolution of the platform and its community over time.

Cowan brings over two decades of experience in journalism and media to these stories, having begun her career in broadcast journalism in 2000 before building Creative Boom into a magazine, podcast and mentoring practice for creative professionals. She hosts the Creative Boom Podcast to extend these conversations in audio, and mentors a small number of creative founders and freelancers one-to-one. Across all formats, her work consistently amplifies emerging talent and underrepresented voices while connecting individual stories to the broader dynamics of the creative and entertainment industries.