Toby Jones is responsible for many a pretty thing you may have looked upon in your time – most recently his range of jewellery 'The Loot'. This unique collection of trinkets, seemingly delivered from the future, recently landed on shelves in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.

Mr Jones has been working as a freelance designer for about a year and a half now, mainly producing work for Sydney-cum-international label ksubi. His ascent to freelance-dom began with a chance encounter with a job advert on a ferry. It was 2001 and Toby was studying a BA of Design at Sydney Design College. The story goes something like this…

'I was on the ferry on the way to some volunteer work experience at an ad agency, when I picked up the paper and saw the ad for Insight. So I ditched the work experience for the interview and got the job.'

Toby's two and a half years of work for street/surf label Insight began.

He worked on creating graphics for t-shirts but all the ideas for the designs came from above:

'It was my job to drum up other people's imaginations. I was pretty much someone else's pen.'

But a foot in the door it was none-the-less, and Toby's memories of his days working for the then ghetto-street label in its infancy (whose Dank Street offices featured not only toileted carpet but also other graphic artists with strong vision and different ideas) are fond.

Eventually, brand-focused work proved too numbing for this designer, who says he was just as creative back then as he is now. In fact many of the ideas he is bringing to fruition today were dreamt up back then. So Toby banded together with friends Paul Wilson, Tom Edwards and Thorsten Kult to start the design company The Revolution.

The company bought him three years worth of semi-emancipated design work; whatever they could wrap their designing brains around.

Post Revolution, Toby is his own man and gets to drum up whatever the heck he wants. But these days a different brand of pressures still persist, 'When you're working on your own you often have to downsize to smaller jobs because you don't have the infrastructure to support you.'

And then there was that time he found himself working on a bill-paying job that he begrudgingly accepted, 'I totally hated it. I was working for some religious based company that had lots of money, It was the most boring thing I've ever done'

Nowadays, with his pen-monkey ghetto days behind him, and future religious temptation resisted, Toby has made the switch to making the jewellery he was thinking up while working at Insight. With the power of freelance status, Toby spews his creativity into his own brand of design: 'I do ideas that don't come from a trend. They're more personal things that you don't see everyday.”'