Viva Lewes Issue 117 June 2016

“This one was my favourite,” says Jack Davey,
showing me one of the four designs he’s come up
with in just two days. “…but then I showed it to
my girlfriend. She’s an art teacher so she’s very
good at marking work.”
Jack runs Studio Bolt, a design and branding
agency which has recently moved to Lewes. “I
launched the studio earlier this year,” he says. “It
kind of came off the back of my and my partner
Nicole’s (very late) gap year. We took a route
through Asia over several months, then arrived in
Sydney, where I quickly realised I hadn’t saved up
enough for the second half of the trip. I ended up
hunting for some work in Sydney and did a few
freelance gigs before ending up at a great little design
practice for a few months.”
“It gave me the freelance bug, but also showed me
what you can do with a small agency if you choose
the right work to do. When I got back to the UK
I looked around for similar practices, but couldn’t
find any big enough to hire me, or small enough
that I felt I could make a difference, so decided to
start up by myself.”
Studio Bolt is an unusual studio in that Jack is the
only full-time employee. He works with a network
of experienced freelancers, who he brings in on
a project-by-project basis. “I decided to run the
studio that way because usually when you work
for an agency, you’ll have one week of really exciting
work and then three weeks working on less
exciting projects. As a freelancer you can pick and
choose what to work on, so it keeps things fresher.”
His first idea for this month’s cover was “a take
on classic Swiss design, using letters as graphic
objects and attempting to portray the movementbased
theme of the issue through the slanted type.”
To achieve the papery texture Jack says he printed
the lettering out, and then scanned it back onto
the computer.
The next concept was “a kind of take on repeatpattern
pop art, playing with the idea of turning
an everyday object into a wallpaper.” And the third
– his original favourite – was “kind of weird,” he
says, “but I like it. It shows the bicycle as this hero
object, in a kind of glossy packaging, with the diagonal
stripe in the background creating a sense of
forward motion.”
The Viva office voted unanimously for his final
idea, which Jack describes as “a simplified-down,
graphic take on an arrivals board.” We loved the
retro split-flap display and the pattern it created
across the page, with the icons at the bottom subtly
referencing some of the issue’s features.
“Studio Bolt is still super young,” he says, “so
we’re on the hunt for local businesses that we can
work with, from simple logo design jobs to larger
re-brands. We’re a small business that wants to do
‘big’ work.”
Rebecca Cunningham
studiobolt.co.uk
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