Run Joy Run: We talk to Joy Studio about their love for running, and staying small but shooting big

Joy Studio’s work is chockablock with surprising moments – there’s gritty, textured work for running crews and brands, a zen-looking mascot for a conference held for World Mental Health Day, and a 3D poofy, furry mushroom for a local farm growing medicinal mushrooms. What this illustrates is the studio’s ability to respond to any piece of culture, achieved by tapping into their keen sense of what makes any brand tick. The Kraków-based studio, though, has a special love for brands that celebrate running and those that stand at the cutting edge of culture with something interesting to say. As Joy Studio rightly says, “Design shapes culture shapes design.” Running and culture are deeply intertwined, as are design and culture, and this is something Joy Studio understands. Unspooling the overlapping strands between these worlds is what they are best at. To dig into their world, we caught up with Co-founder Radek Sadlik and he unpacked the studio’s love for running (even the serifs on their ‘R’ mascot seem like running shoes to us), the challenges and joys of working in such a nice space, and walked us through how their journey has shaped up so far – from starting small during the pandemic to staying small but thinking big.