Matt Eley

Bio

Matt studied at UWE, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts Honours degree in Graphic Design. During his studies, his work was featured in Creative Review and Design Week, and he won the prestigious Proctor & Stevenson Design Award. He was recruited directly from his degree show in 1994 by the Pentland Group, where he began his professional design career.

After three years with Pentland, Matt left to pursue a freelance career before co-founding 313y Limited in the late 1990s. In his first year at 313y, he was elected to the International Society of Typographic Designers. As creative director of 313y for nearly three decades, Matt has delivered engaging, effective solutions to a wide range of corporate clients including T-Mobile, Bupa, Santander, Direct Line Group, easyJet, Balfour Beatty, TfL, NHS, Bank of America, RBS, NatWest, and ITV. His work helps organisations tackle complex problems through clear and creative communication. Matt brings his considerable knowledge of typography and design into his painted works.

Statement

Matt Eley’s work emerges from a long career in graphic design, a world built on speed, precision, and planned obsolescence. After three decades creating campaigns designed to disappear as quickly as they arrived, he turned to painting in search of something more permanent and more personal. Eley’s shift was not a rejection of design, but an extension of it: a move from solving other people’s problems to confronting his own questions about memory, language, and emotional endurance. Where corporate work measures success in clicks and conversions, Eley’s paintings measure it in whether a phrase stays with you after you leave the room.

At the centre of his practice is the belief that words are not neutral. They carry emotional charge, personal history, and cultural weight, often far beyond their literal meaning. Eley paints short, loaded phrases that sit between what is said and what is felt, treating language as both material and memory. In an age where words are endlessly reproduced, politicised, and skimmed on screens, his hand-painted typography slows them down and gives them physical presence. The visible brushstrokes, irregular edges, and imperfect lines are not stylistic accidents but evidence of a human body behind the language, restoring intimacy to words that digital culture has made disposable.

His paintings explore both the private and public lives of language, from intimate confessions to words that feel as though they have been left behind in the world like traces of lived experience. Eley believes that typography is the fastest route to emotional engagement, a conviction shaped by three decades of working within visual communication. Rather than asking viewers to decode images or wait for feeling to slowly emerge, his work confronts them directly through language, allowing a phrase to strike first and resonate later.

Set against surfaces that suggest time, erosion, and memory, these words reinforce his central idea that while places crumble and moments pass, the emotional force of language persists. His paintings invite viewers to recognise themselves inside a single line of text, as a mirror of their own love, loss, hope, or regret.