Photostore is the Crafts Council's unique visual database, helping young designer-makers to present their unique crafts. The site features more than 60,000 images representing more than one-thousand of the top UK designer-makers.

Designer-makers cover all craft disciplines including basketry, glass, ceramics, fashion and textiles, furniture, jewellery, silversmithing and textiles. Each maker has a profile that includes a portfolio of projects showing their work alongside. With an artist statement, an up-to-date news section, their resume, social media links and much more you can get to know some of the best contemporary talent working today.

Photostore allows you to search by maker, discipline, material, location, and price range.

Commissioning and research

Photostore is used by public art commissioning bodies, curators, and collectors. Online business for luxury goods is booming and comparison shopping is common. As a result young designer-makers need online presence. Photostore is an invaluable tool for commissioning and researching contemporary craft, presenting as it does an opportunity to reach customers directly with the potential to build brand loyalty.

The work of contemporary designer-makers is diverse, innovative, with very high quality production. Their independent and original vision extends their work well beyond the traditional. Designer-makers make objects that combine ingenuity with great beauty, a reminder of the potential of individual human creativity. The designs may be sensual, witty, novel, innovative. They all have the potential to enhance either our public or personal space, to decorate our homes or adorn our bodies. Since they bear the mark of the hand of the maker, they are set apart from the majority of daily manufactured objects we own and use.

Photostore represents up and coming designer-makers via the Crafts Council Development Award and Next Move scheme, offering support schemes for new creative businesses and recent graduates.

Designer-makers need to be successful businesspeople in order to thrive. The Crafts Council actively promotes contemporary crafts, operating a grant scheme to which recently established makers can apply, providing vital seed funding at the beginning of their careers.

Designer-makers are a way of life in the UK and far beyond glib fashion. These are exciting times, with possibilities to extend crafts and designs beyond the making of beautiful objects and move into areas such as technology, medicine and industry via a developing comprehension that skill and a deep understanding of materials can help solve real problems.

From workshops to year-long programmes, for makers who are just starting out to those already well-established, the Craft Council helps designer-makers make the most of their talent, setting a standard for excellence and driving increased ambition and aspiration through the sector.

Order your bespoke gift

Support our young talent and designer-makers to create a gift for your anniversary, for a birthday or any other special occasion. We partner wit hsome of the best gift retailers in the industry so you can be asured that you will get excellent quality and unique items. Here you can see and order some of the best anniversary gifts for women available on the Internet. There are many choices you can make including clothes that cover all fashion styles as well as the best in textiles, glass, ceramics, silver and fine metal work, wood, furniture and art jewellery.

The products you can order are made with skill and can include labour intensive hand processes developed over many years. Each work of art can be identified as being from a particular individuals as they are unique, high quality products easily distinguished from mass production pieces and cheap imports.

Crafts Council

Building a strong economy and infrastructure for contemporary designer-makers is one of the aims of the UK Crafts Council. To increase the diversity and volume of people interested in high quality contemporary craft by championing craft practice both at home and abroad, by supporting designer-makers to play a strong and dynamic role in the cultural, social and economic life of the UK will open the sector to everyone in Britain and become a place of excellence for those interested in contemporary craft.

By supporting Photostore, you will be helping to nurture artistic talent, encourage innovation and bring the joy of designer-maker goods into the lives of others or as a gift to yourself.

There are many design platforms and designer guild websites that provide independent designers and young emerging designers with the opportunity to become a member and have a platform from which to promote their profile to a wider and often international audience.

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