Chesapeake is a collaborative & multidisciplinary creative studio working in the areas of graphic design, identity, website design & development and photography. Our ethos is pretty simple: do great work with great people and build long-term reciprocal relationships. We enjoy our work which tends to mean we pay attention to the people we work with and the stories they wish to tell.

We recognise that design has an important part to play in making communication & interaction clearer and more enjoyable. We apply equal measures of humour and thoughtfulness to our projects and aim to make work with sincerity that reflects the values of our clients and our own.

Chesapeake operates with transparently and accommodates work and budgets of most shapes and sizes.

David Abbott

Creative Director

David was born in Hertfordshire, and moved to the States when he was 15. He spent 8 years in Virginia (close to the Chesapeake Bay), completing high school and receiving a Bachelor’s Degree in Studio Art from James Madison University, where his passion for printmaking began. Becoming disenchanted by a second Bush term, he returned to the UK and set up Hackleys Press, a small screenprinting studio to sate his desire for print. Within a couple years of returning to the UK he enrolled at the University of the West of England where he received an MA in Multidisciplinary Printmaking in 2007. Shortly afterward, David became a founding member of Snap Studio, a gallery, studio and printmaking facility in the heart of Bristol and now a fixture in the Bristol art scene. He taught screenprinting workshops and became involved with the local community, helping to launch the Christmas Steps Arts Quarter and currently its Secretary. David setup Chesapeake with Frea Buckler in April 2009, in a studio with large sash windows overlooking the Christmas Steps and the floating harbour.

David has taught graphic design and photography at the City of Bristol College, and has been a practicing designer for almost a decade.

Frea Buckler

Marketing

Frea is a screenprinter extraordinaire and a nationally exhibiting artist. When she’s not organising shipping her work off somewhere new and wonderful, she’s in the studio touching up photographs or sharing design advice with David. Frea has been making art for as long as her memory goes back. She studied Fine Art, Printmaking and Photomedia at Central Saint Martin’s College, London, and completed her formal art education with an MA in Multidisciplinary Printmaking at the University of the West of England in Bristol. In 2007 Frea’s bright imagination led to the creation of Snap Studio. Frea’s work is typified by a bold, studied use of colour, incredible attention to detail and a technicians’ skill, all vital qualities she brings to Chesapeake.

Frea is also a visiting instructor in screenprinting at the University of the West of England.