About Nicola Jones

Artist. Storyteller. Designer. Creative thinker.

Hello, I’m Nicola Jones, a multimedia artist, storyteller and creative entrepreneur based on the Isle of Bute, Scotland.

My work has always moved between art, technology, storytelling and ideas. I create characters, brands, products, images and stories — often beginning with something very small and allowing it to develop into a much bigger world.

I’m interested in how creativity works: how an idea becomes an image, how an image becomes a story, how a story becomes a product or a brand, and how creativity can connect people, places and communities.

Much of what I do is colourful and playful. Behind it, however, is more than twenty-five years of working with creativity, multimedia and evolving technology.

From Glasgow to Bute

My creative journey began in Glasgow, where I studied multimedia at the College of Building & Printing before completing my BSc in Multimedia at Glasgow Caledonian University in 2000.

It was an exciting time to study digital media. The internet was still young, multimedia was changing rapidly, and we were learning to combine photography, graphics, video, sound, animation and interactive technology in completely new ways.

During those years I also became heavily involved in student life and served as Student President.

That experience taught me something that has stayed with me throughout my career: creativity is rarely just about making things.

It is also about people, communication, problem-solving and finding ways to turn ideas into reality.

In 2000, I moved to the Isle of Bute, which has been home ever since.

Island life changed my work.

The landscape, communities, changing seasons, history and slightly slower rhythm of Bute became part of the way I observe and create.

My work now moves quite naturally between the digital world and the physical one — between technology and nature, commerce and art, imagination and everyday life.

Creativity & Education

For around ten years, I taught creativity, multimedia and arts through Argyll College on Bute.

Teaching gave me another perspective on creativity.

I became particularly interested in helping people gain the confidence to experiment, make mistakes, solve problems and discover their own way of creating.

One of the projects I am especially proud of was our creative film work with Crew Phoenix, supporting adults with additional learning needs through collaborative arts and multimedia projects.

That work received a national teaching award for innovation.

It reinforced something I still believe strongly:

Creativity belongs to everyone.

Art, Ideas & Building Brands

Over the years my creative practice has expanded far beyond one medium.

I've worked across digital art, photography, illustration, publishing, fashion, product design, tourism, education and community projects.

I've also developed several independent creative brands.

The Highland Dancer® grew from my work around Highland dance and Scottish gifting.

Happy Tartan® allowed me to explore tartan in a much more colourful, contemporary and playful way, combining fashion, characters, storytelling and Scottish identity.

And more recently, I've been developing Braw Gifts™ and Pure Braw™ — a new world of Scottish characters, humour and useful everyday gifts featuring the Braw Bunch: Mr Moo Coo™, Paddy Baa™ and Mr Seagull™.

Although these projects can look very different from one another, they're all connected by the same thing:

an idea and the curiosity to see where it might go.

Growing Up Alongside Technology

Technology has been part of my creative life from the beginning.

I started working with multimedia when digital creativity involved very different tools, machines and limitations from those we have today.

Since then I've watched — and worked through — enormous changes in photography, websites, ecommerce, social media, digital publishing, design software and now artificial intelligence.

I've never been particularly interested in technology simply because it's new.

I'm interested in what creative people can do with it.

New tools can make things faster, but they don't decide what should exist.

They don't have the original idea.

They don't know which tiny detail feels wrong.

They don't know when something suddenly feels right.

That part is still human.

For me, technology is another material — just as photography, paint, fabric, words or a camera can be materials.

The tools keep changing.

The creative thinking remains.

Inspired by Place

Living on Bute continues to influence almost everything I make.

Sometimes that influence is obvious — tartan, Highland dancers, Highland cows, seagulls, landscapes and Scottish stories.

Sometimes it is much quieter.

It might be a colour in the sky, something overheard in a shop, an old building, an island character, a ridiculous conversation or an idea that arrives while walking somewhere.

I like that mixture.

My work doesn't sit neatly in one box, and I've stopped trying to make it.

Art can become a product.
A product can tell a story.
A character can become a world.
Technology can become a creative tool.
And a small idea can become something much bigger than you originally imagined.

What I'm Working on Now

Today I continue to work across art, storytelling, publishing, design and creative brand development.

Some projects are commercial. Some are personal. Some involve communities. Some take years before they're ready to leave the studio.

I'm still learning, experimenting and building.

And I'm still fascinated by that moment when something that previously existed only in your head finally becomes real.

This website is where I document some of that journey — the finished work, the ideas behind it, the experiments, the brands and occasionally the bits that happen in between.

Welcome to my world.

Nicola x

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