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Meet The Maker: Rude Studio
If you’re in the market for an instant Serotonin boost, we think a Rude print is the perfect place to start.
Rude is a London based creative studio founded by Abi and Rupert - epic design minds, parents and newly coffee shop owners who met in 1998 at a London design agency. Their shared love of print, mark-making and hand-drawn fonts made the decision to start a company together easy and we are SO glad they did!
We talked to Rupert about colour and creativity, only to find his insights as infectiously feel-good as the work at Rude.
Hi Rupert! What do you make?
We make Art & Coffee from our London shop ‘Everyday Sunshine', selling a mix of screen prints, digital prints, greeting cards and some merchandise.
Great name btw - What does Rude mean to you?
Ha! Well...RUDE came form Rupert freelancing in Design, he was nick named RU-DESIGN which was then shortened to RUDE.
The brand name now means all things RUDE - colourful, positive hand drawn graphic art, which hopefully uplifts people. We are the purveyors of colourful graphic art!
Please tell us about your journey into graphics. Did you study? What drew you into creating your totally mood-boosting prints?
Rupert studied Printmaking and Illustration and Abi studied Graphic Design, and we then met at a small design studio in West London, designing very corporate literature for corporate clients. Out of that came RUDE and we wanted to create a creative business that was the opposite of corporate. Specialising in print and hand drawn work away from the computer screen.
Rude’s body of work is so diverse yet so uniquely Rude!
Please tell us about your creative process.
We’re print makers at heart so we start with pens and paper and then our work builds up a bit like a screen print. We're obsessed with mark making and often draw inspiration from mistakes and things that happen in the process by accident.
We love your eye-popping colour palettes. What role does colour play in your designs?
Colour is huge to us, and we think sometimes we get blinded by bright colours. Often we use as many colours as we can…like being in a sweet shop and choosing too many sweets. So sometimes is good to then pair it back to 4 - 6 colours.
What does a typical work day in the life of Rude HQ look like?
We have recently opened a coffee hatch in our gallery / shop, so we have to be up and open at 8.30am having dropped our boys at school. The shop is open until 4pm and we still run our screen print studio 5 mins away form the shop, so we go there to do all the creative work. At the moment life is full on, but as we get to know how our shop works we will pull people in to help us. The balance will be half the time in the studio and half the time in the shop.
Please tell us about your studio/work space. What do you need around you to thrive?
So our shop is where we sell the work, but the studio space is a print studio where we go and get messy. The studio is quiet and such a lovely place to work.
What piece of advice would you give emerging creatives who might want to start their own business?
Just go for it, creativity is so important at the moment, when governments are telling people to retrain and saying that creative businesses aren’t viable It’s important to rise up and show that creativity is everything. It’s not an easy path but if it’s your calling you have to do it.
After seeing your work on the Makers Mrkt site I spent like half a day on your instagram! This might be the trickiest question of all but do you have a favourite project or piece of work you’ve done?
Actually our shop has to be our favourite project, is got delaying due to the pandemic and then delayed and then just as we opened it we were told we had to shut…so it feels like it risen out the ashes!
What are some of your goals for 2021?
To sell positive art to up lift people spirits, and to enjoy every day full of colour.
You can see more of Rudes' colourful work here
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