WIP Tell us why you started Studio Bergini right after graduation.

KHB Towards the end of our studies in 2015, we were both feeling a bit disillusioned with education and the academic environment and had already started collaborating on commercial jobs and commissions inside and outside of college. We were both eager to stay in London, develop our design practices on our own terms “in the real world”, and not become a cog in the wheel of some big agency. So, since we were already collaborating well, we decided to give it a go and see if we could make it work.

WIP What inspired you to start doing workshops and other teaching activities?

KHB Around 2015, we bought a risograph printer together with some friends and taught ourselves how to operate, repair, and maintain it, hoping to do some printing work on the side. Soon after graduation, we were approached by the head of the VisCom course at the Royal College of Art to bring our machine and set up a printing lab there. So we sold our share in the old one, bought a new one, and brought it to the RCA, starting the Royal Duplication Centre, an experimental Riso printing lab which we ran for 6 years at the fringes of the academic program, sort of half in-half out, as there was no real framework for this sort of thing. We each did 1–2 days there per week – printing, teaching printing, running workshops and experimenting – which is how we sustained ourselves while slowly growing Studio Bergini.

Other one-off teaching and lecturing activities come in occasionally, which we sometimes take on just because they’re fun, and it’s nice to inspire some students.

WIP How do you think these teaching activities contributed to your own growth as designers?

KHB Well, in our case, they were literally how we made money before we got enough design work to sustain ourselves, but from being super exciting, it slowly became more and more of just a job, which is why we eventually decided to leave it alone. So we rarely do teaching-related activities any more, as we focus our time on the studio. But as recent graduates from a BA, it was super valuable to be around the MA and PhD students at RCA; we made a lot of friends and contacts there. The experiments we made teaching workshops were a great way to think differently about our work and definitely informed our practice.

WIP How do you tailor your design solutions for cultural and educational institutions compared to commercial clients?

KHB We don’t really, or we try not to. If there is no profit motive, the work can sometimes be allowed to be a bit more weird and loosely defined, but generally, we try to approach all projects in more or less the same way, which is essentially to tailor our design solution to the client’s needs while experimenting and trying to push conventions. We try to work on a broad spectrum of clients and outcomes, not to be too narrowly specialised; it seems more interesting that way. That said, most of our work still tends to be culture-adjacent.

WIP Do you have any advice for aspiring graphic designers or those looking to start their own design studio?

KHB We always say “go for it” when people ask this. As a young designer, you really don’t have much to lose. It can take a long time to become financially sustainable, but as long as you’re patient and willing/able to put in the time, you can make it work. And it’s definitely not seen as a bad thing in the industry to have tried starting on your own, so if you decide to give up, you can probably just get a job somewhere at that point. Personally, we are always half regretting not having worked somewhere else for a couple of years prior to establishing a studio, as the learning curve for two early-20s BA graduates starting a company in a foreign country with no relevant job experience was extremely steep and, at times, painful. But at the same time, not having that input from a senior figure allowed us to find our own ways of doing things and to discover our own voice, which I think has been valuable.

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