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