Art & Design
Top 7 Dundee Design Connections
Dundee’s creative identity reaches far beyond its size. The Scottish city helped put The Beano and The Dandy into millions of homes, produced video games with global influence, trained generations of artists and designers, and built an international reputation for design. These seven connections reveal how education feeds industry, popular culture becomes heritage, and a city’s creative past keeps shaping its future. Dundee was the UK’s first UNESCO City of Design, but the more interesting question is what that distinction looks like on the ground.
Designed by Japanese architect Kengo Kuma and opened in 2018, V&A Dundee gives the city’s design story an international stage. But its significance goes beyond the striking waterfront building: it creates a place to explore how design shapes everyday life, from objects and architecture to the systems around us. Dundee’s creative reputation was built long before the museum arrived, through publishing, education and industry. The V&A makes that history visible while asking what Scottish design might become next.
DCA is where Dundee’s creative identity feels active rather than commemorative. Its galleries, independent cinema and print studio put contemporary art alongside the practical process of making and sharing it. That combination matters in a city known for visual storytelling and design education: creative culture is not just a collection of celebrated objects, but a set of spaces where people can experiment, encounter unfamiliar ideas and develop work of their own. DCA gives Dundee’s design reputation a living, changing counterpart to the landmark museum on the waterfront.
A city’s creative reputation cannot survive on heritage alone; it needs a way to produce the next generation. Duncan of Jordanstone, part of the University of Dundee, has helped do that through teaching and studio practice across illustration, animation, textiles, product design and fine art. Its importance is not simply that it turns out talented graduates. It connects creative education with local organisations and industry, helping ideas move from student work into the wider world. It is one of the foundations beneath Dundee’s reputation as a design city.
The festival makes design public. Rather than leaving creative work inside studios, classrooms or specialist institutions, it creates a meeting point for designers, businesses, students and curious visitors. Its place in this ranking is about the city’s wider creative ecosystem: design becomes more than a professional discipline when people can see it, question it and take part. Festivals are temporary, unlike museums or universities, but they can reveal the energy connecting them. The test is whether that attention helps new collaborations and ideas continue after the event ends.
The Beano is one of Dundee’s most influential cultural exports, and a reminder that design does not have to look solemn or expensive to matter. First published in 1938 by Dundee-based DC Thomson, it built a visual language of anarchic humour, expressive characters and instantly recognisable comic storytelling. Dennis the Menace and the Bash Street Kids travelled far beyond the city, shaping British childhoods for generations. The Beano belongs in a design ranking because illustration, lettering, character creation and page composition are design too — and popular culture can be just as influential as a museum collection.
The Dandy shows the other side of Dundee’s comics legacy: a publishing operation that turned locally produced characters into national fixtures. Launched in 1937, it introduced Desperate Dan and a world of exaggerated expressions, visual gags and memorable character design. Alongside The Beano, it helped establish Dundee as a centre of British comics publishing, where illustration was both an art form and a mass-market business. Its influence is not just nostalgic. The comic tradition demonstrates how a consistent visual identity, strong characters and repeatable storytelling can build relationships with audiences across generations.
Dundee’s games story is one of the city’s most consequential creative connections. Local developers helped create Lemmings and the original Grand Theft Auto, while the wider ecosystem connects design, programming, animation, sound and interactive storytelling. Abertay University helped reinforce that ecosystem by pioneering degree-level education in computer games technology. Games are not simply software produced in a place: they are designed worlds built by multidisciplinary teams. Dundee’s influence shows how a city’s creative and educational networks can generate work played by millions worldwide.
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