designer spotlight - tom pigeon for SMUG
Tom Pigeon is a small design studio, based on the East coast of Scotland, founded by Pete and Kirsty Thomas in 2014. SMUG has been stocking and enjoying their work for some time now. Last year I commissioned them to rework one of my own patterns to produce a collection of SMUG exclusive brass foiled notebooks. We're also lucky enough to share a joint exclusive with Tom Pigeon on their limited run of Metallic Letterpress Number Prints. Metallic Letterpress Cinematype Prints 0-9 available at SMUG. Brass Foiled Notebooks available at SMUG We also sell their jewellery and Cinematype prints. Can you tell I'm a big fan?
It's the SMUG exclusives above that I'm most proud of though. Kirsty and Pete design beautiful things and are lovely people that are a dream to work with. In order to give you a little more insight into the designers behind the studio, I asked them a few questions about their backgrounds, inspirations and design priorities.
Tell us a bit about each of your backgrounds and how you came to be doing what you're doing now? We met and started working as designers in the early 1990’s and since then have worked across design disciplines, for small companies and big business, designing all kinds of stuff for lots of different people. Kirsty has worked in the fashion industry as a designer and visual merchandiser designing for small indie retailers and big stores like Top Shop. Pete set up the international design agency Uniform whilst still at university and in 2014 was shortlisted for the Design Museum’s Designs of the Year. Tom Pigeon was formed after years of us working separately but always contributing to each others projects. As Tom Pigeon we design simple things for people to enjoy including prints, jewellery and stationery as well as taking on creative commissions and consultancy work. Our work is exhibited and sold across the world. We created Tom Pigeon to make the kind of things we would like to own and live with.
What are you most inspired by and which key elements of the Tom Pigeon studio most resinate with you personally? We love clean design; Mid-century Modern, Brutalism and Minimalism but are equally inspired by our traditional, rural surroundings - colours and reflections in the sea, fishing boats, the structure and shapes of the local harbours. It’s important to us that our products are carefully crafted, either by our team in the studio or by the amazing makers and artisans that we work with to produce our prints, jewellery and stationery.
If you had to choose one SMUG product what would it be? HAY's Wooden Spinning Tops - playful, colourful, simple.
