Computer Graphics International (CGI) is one of the most prestigious conferences in the world where researchers and professional practitioners are gathered annually to celebrate and share their novel achievements in computer graphics. CGI is the official conference of the Computer Graphics Society, a long-standing international computer graphics organisation. CGI and CGS were started in Tokyo by Professor T.L. Kunii from the University of Tokyo in 1983. Over the past decades, the CGI conference has been a key venue for the computer graphics community. In 2012 the CGI conference was held in Bournemouth, United Kingdom. This special issue of The Visual Computer contains the best 35 papers for CGI2012. We received well over 200 submissions this year. To ensure the highest quality of the publications, we employed a senior reviewer system. Each appointed senior reviewer was asked to bid for the papers to review, which best match their expertise. For each paper the senior reviewers were allocated, they then invited three reviewers best positioned to comment the quality and provide constructive feedbacks to the authors. We would like to thank all the Program Committee members who acted as senior reviewers. Our gratitude also goes to the reviewers who were working extremely hard to complete the reviews in a short time frame. Last but not the least, we should not forget the local organization team’s diligence and efficiency in handling paper sorting, feedback collection and miscellaneous support provision to the reviewing process.