James Hurst
After cutting his teeth with the team at Cog Design (2004-2008), James was asked to lead the design team of the forward thinking digital agency Emak Mafu (2008 - 2009). He had the pleasure of working with a high profile client roster including artists and architects like Antony Gormley and David Chipperfield. When Emak Mafu was taken over by Amp London (2009) James opened Cure Studio.

He maintains a semi-regular column on Run Riot about portfolios worth noticing, and exhibits in various guises at exhibitions that have included Tent London (Truman Brewery 2010), Pick Me Up (Somerset House, 2010, 2011) and various Blisters exhibitions (Print Club London, 2009, 2010, 2011).

He also curates exhibitions, with the recent Power In Numbers exhibition, co-curated with Fred Higginson Print Club London showing in London, Boston and Tokyo.

Alongside Cure he manages various 'side' projects including The Type Foundry and is the co-director of the illustration agency HigginsonHurst.

Oschon Wespi-Tschopp
After working in-house at Liberty Osch joined the Cure team at the start of 2011. An incredible screen printer, illustrator and designer with a range of prints for sale in various shops under the name ‘Consist & See’. He supports James in various capacities and is in charge of sourcing and promoting artists for The Type Foundry.

Design is a process that starts with understanding and investigation. We would want to know so much about you and what you want to do before we could, hand-on-heart give a fair picture about how we would build a brand, layout a leaflet or deliver a website.

This also means our current clients aren’t paying us to do other peoples creative work. If we work together, when we say we are working for you - we are.

A system that demands free work is a barrier for people who can't afford to give their time away for nothing. Although we rarely have interns working on live briefs, we do want them to work as a full time team member. Having an intern is our opportunity to invest time and knowledge back into our industry while gaining new perspectives on our work.

This means we interview interns properly, we expect interns to work the hours we do (well... almost the hours we do) and most importantly, we expect our interns to develop as thinkers; not tea caddies.

Find out who you are emailing, and write to somone, not dear sir or madam. Look at what your prospective company do and let them know why you are right for them and how you will enrich their work.

Use common sense and don't send a 3mb PDF portfolio by email.

Do something in the real world, the postman comes everyday.

Kamal Meattle gave a TED talk on the benefits plants in the work environment. His research about the benefits is astonishing, the most tangible being better concentration and productivity (but there are many more). We then worked with House Of Plants who set us up with some well established plants that we have hung upside down in the centre of the studio to help break up the space.

We manage our own dedicated servers hand built and maintained in data centres in Manchester. We run a proper back up of both the working website files and any associated databases. Our primary server has 4 GiB of memory with 2 cores and an AMD Athlon II X2 240e (2.8GHz) processor. We split that across 2 × 500GB discs. We can manage custom solutions for clients based on their needs.

We don't host websites built by third parties.

We have extensive experience in a number of different content management systems. This allows us to determine the most appropriate CMS for a particular job.

A few of our favourites are Expression Engine, which is incredibly flexible and secure, Drupal an open source framework that works well at creating large community sites or Django where we have complete control over the shape of the site.

For smaller brochure sites we tend to favour a newer system, Perch.

James is the co-director of the illustration agency HigginsonHurst that he runs with Kate Higginson. Together they represent artists worldwide working across TV advertising, marketing imagery, fashion and editorial illustration. As Cure Studio James has worked with all of the illustrators on the current Hh books.

visit HigginsonHurst

A Cure Studio project to develop a miscellany of titillating type within an ecosystem that supports, financially, hardworking type creators.

visit The Type Foundry

A pass the pen project where one illustrator draws a section of a comic, before passing the pen onto someone else. The work is ongoing, and when 100 illustrators have taken part we will screenprint the story and put on a big party to celebrate!

visit Big Antidote