Born on the Dancefloor

The family-run London design studio was born from a shared love of club culture; and found fame with the birth of dubstep

Words KAMILA RYMAJDO

Give Up Art’s origin story starts on the dancefloor, but not exactly how you’d imagine, given the brand’s collaborations with the iconic British club night FWD>> or Rinse FM. It was 1989 and Give Up Art co-founder Stuart Hammersley had planned to go to a rave in his native Essex, but it got shut down. Determined not to let the premature end ruin his night, he went back home and got changed, needing “proper trousers” to get into The Copford Windmill near Colchester, which he describes as the quintessential “cheesy first pub you go to in your local town”. As it turned out, it’s where he met his wife and Give Up Art co-founder, Emma Hammersley.

While Stuart started off in magazine publishing, Emma worked in advertising, which made for the perfect team: “Emma had the project management skills and I did the creative stuff,” Stuart explains over the phone. But it was meeting Tempa Recordings founder Neil Jolliffe, who’s credited with coining the term ‘dubstep’ back in 2002 that gave Give Up Art its music focus and enough work to let the duo leave their existing jobs. “With Neil, we shared a love of music together,” Stuart says, recalling how they would go out in London – to Bar Rumba in the West End, where they’d go for the deep house night Space or drum ‘n’ bass Movement, or to Blue Note in Hoxton Square for Metalheadz, Ninja Tune and DJ Harvey events. “Eventually, Neil started a couple of labels and together with Sarah [“Soulja”] Lockhart they started FWD>> and asked me to do some of their designs,” Stuart says. 

“It was really exciting,” Stuart remembers of the time. “When I first heard the music on Tempa and going to the early FWD>> nights, it reminded me a lot of when I first started going out in my teenage years during the acid house times.” Indeed, Give Up Art’s aesthetic for FWD>>, who hosted such acts as Mala, Skream and Benga and Plastician, shares some similarities with the minimalist design of nightclubs like the Hacienda. “Some of the first ever flyers we did [for FWD>>] were a bit of a jumble to be honest but as we got into it, it was, ‘how can we make it purely functional?’ So we had one typeface, one colour,” Stuart says. “I guess it was a point of difference to a lot of stuff that was out there, a lot of graphics around garage were diametrically opposed to what we wanted to do, which was to strip it all back, to reflect the music.”

It’s an aesthetic that has proved successful for Give Up Art – who got their tongue-in-cheek name from a badge a friend wore at college – in their other music related projects too. “When we rebranded Rinse around 2006, we picked this one cyan colour, and when you’d see their flyers and posters amongst others, they really did stand out, they made an impact in their simplicity.” Once again, Give Up Art was going against the grain, as their designs for the London-born radio station stood in stark contrast to what Stuart describes as the moodiness of that period in music-focused visuals. 

Their signature typeface simplicity and boldness in colour choice remains relevant – it’s difficult not to come across imitations of that distinctive one shade branding that make the early FWD>> flyers and Rinse branding so memorable, in music and beyond, even as Give Up Art have branched out to work with more corporate clients such as Sony, the Official Charts Company and publishing brands like the constructive journalism imprint Positive News. 

Stuart says some of his proudest collaborations are with photographer Shaun Bloodworth, who was a key figure in the dubstep scene before passing away as he awaited a liver transplant in 2016. “We did the Skream [debut] album together and we did stuff for Tempa, then we ended up doing some projects through [Warp Records launched independent record shop] Bleep,” Stuart says. This included North/South/East/West, a collaborative project which focused on the music of different regions of the UK and America and The Green Series, a limited 12” vinyl release exploring techno music. Now, Give Up Art are working with Shaun’s family and friends, to set up an archive of his work. “The plan is to launch a website with his imagery and some stories behind the key photographs that he’s taken,” Stuart says of the “bittersweet” project.

Give Up Art continue to work with clubbing related brands, Stuart says, namechecking the hardcore homage Evident Ware compilations released by Berlin-via-Bristol bass label Sneaker Social Club and work for Declassified, a new imprint from SP:MC, as recent projects. And, while they’re not the brand’s most lucrative collaborations, Stuart says it’s especially rewarding to take on commissions informed by relationships forged on the dance floor, singling out a re-brand for the curios-celebrating label Power Vacuum as a favourite recently. It seems then, that while Stuart and Emma are no longer often out on the dancefloor quite so often – they moved back to their native Essex in 2011 – their work keeps them at the forefront of the culture.