“Coming home felt like a mission”: An interview with the co-founder of POV Budapest

Almost every designer eventually faces a big question: move to a global design hub (New York, London, Berlin, and so on) or stay and help grow the local design scene and visual culture? The former offers more immediate opportunities, while the latter is often harder, but can bring deeper, longer-lasting rewards. 

We spoke with Mátyás Czél, the co-founder of Budapest’s POV (Point of View) design conference about how and why to build a local scene.

How POV came about

We launched POV together with my co-founder, Boldi [Boldizsár Mátyás]. He and I both run design studios—he’s the co-founder of Comet Studio, and I’m the solo founder of CM SUPPLY. Right now, we’re a team of five, and Comet is around twenty people. They mostly focus on design systems, while we’re more of a hands-on, idea-driven studio: ideation, kickoffs, branding, new concepts, and motion design. So we make a good mix.

Boldi was tired of always having to go to Vienna for design conferences. It was expensive, time-consuming, and honestly, we felt like everything we needed was already here in Budapest. So we started brainstorming. He reached out to see if, with my design network, we could pull something together. At the same time, I’d just gotten back from a great design conference in Kosovo, where they’d integrated the city into the event in a really inspiring way. That really stuck with me—using the city itself as part of the experience. And that became part of the vision: showing Budapest through the lens of design.

Links to the visual heritage

Our main goal is to elevate visual culture in Budapest and Hungary. We think there’s a strong heritage—whether it’s in photography, typography, film, or even product design—but we don’t really discuss much about it in public. Our design history isn’t that well documented. And because of all the shifts in our political and cultural history, each new era overwrote what came before. We want to approach it differently, as a continuous narrative. We’re not afraid to blend or merge these eras, to think of them as one big, eclectic collage. I think Budapest is the perfect city to represent that vision.

Part of that same goal is to encourage local studios to build on and embrace the heritage we have. By heritage I mean the layered, sometimes naïve, even amateur visual environment that surrounds us. If we approach that with care and don’t rush to erase things just because they don’t fit into our current ideology or aesthetic, then we have an unlimited source of inspiration. Eventually, that leads to a deeper understanding of who we are and how we want to present ourselves on the world stage—not by following others, but by developing our own voice.

The state of Hungarian design

Understanding the local design culture, the visual culture, and bringing that into projects is what makes a studio part of a real design scene. Also, it’s important that they have a viable future and an actual presence internationally as well. There’s definitely a potential for growth, although I’d say the scene is developing at a much better pace now.

There are two big challenges for emerging studios in Budapest. The first one is the gatekeepers, mainly the larger advertising agencies. They tend to dominate access to major clients and brands entering the Hungarian market. So it’s really hard for small studios or freelancers to break through, to move beyond just being outsourced by agencies to translate campaigns, doing low-impact, often uninspiring work.

Reaching the level where you can speak directly with bigger brands or corporations is tough, which is why I always recommend surrounding yourself with like-minded people.

Together, you can form a more robust presence and stand a better chance of winning meaningful projects.

The other challenge, of course, is money. People probably know that wages in Hungary are among the lowest in Europe, and that doesn’t help. But the upside is that graphic design is now very global and remote-friendly. These days, it’s possible to earn a living working two or three days a week for an international client and often making more than a full-time designer at a local ad agency. That opens up room for balance. You can use the extra time and income to take on pro bono or low-budget local projects, supporting small businesses that otherwise couldn’t afford big agencies or foreign studios.

That’s what we try to do: stay connected to the international market, but always leave space to invest back into the local scene. We’re not trying to go fully global and extract everything, we want to bring something home.

How POV helps local design

Most of the mainstage speakers at POV right now are from international, well-established studios. Through them, we learn a lot about their practices, workflows, and organizational models. That knowledge can help studios here grow and evolve. We’re also learning just how fast the design environment is changing, mostly because of new technologies. There’s this grey area now between craft and tech, and we’re always trying to explore that.

It took about a year and a half for studios here to realize we’re not just designing wine labels or printing books.

That kind of work isn’t going to evolve much or have the kind of real impact designers are capable of today. Now it’s about understanding digital systems, designing interactive, building scalable design—recognizing that shift has already happened.

We got a lot of really positive responses from studios and creative people around us. The conference reached the local scene quite well. But honestly, it was a big surprise that it gained more attention internationally than locally. That’s something we’re now trying to shift by engaging the local community more and more. For example, we’re offering free access to part of the event where the local scene is going to be represented, and we’re setting up a venue to showcase the work of local studios, which will be exhibited during POV.

We want to keep building on that throughout the year with new projects under the same umbrella. For example, we started a dinner club series, where we bring together voices that aren’t always visible to each other over a meal. It’s a very different kind of event—it’s not about work, it’s more about meeting people, building a network, growing a scene, having real conversations, and seeing what comes out of that.

We had the first dinner three months ago, and now we’re planning more, also in nearby places: Bratislava, Vienna, Krakow, or Transylvania. That’s the next step—we already have an international audience and a local audience, and now we want to reach what you might call the regional audience as well. We know Budapest and Hungary are small, and Central and Eastern Europe can be tricky because of language barriers. But as designers, we already have something meaningful in common, something we care about and can dive into right away. We share a common language: our love for visual culture, design, and the work we do.

Developing design scenes across Central Europe

First of all, Vienna is definitely on our radar. It’s close, and we’ve got friends there, so we go there pretty often and keep up with what’s happening in Austria. Same with Slovakia, especially in Bratislava. We really like the team around the By Design conference. While they’ve been a huge inspiration for us, they’re now onto new frontiers after organising a conference for more than 10 years. So they’ve kind of passed the baton to us, but we still keep in contact and give credit whenever we can!

The REDO conference in Kosovo was really inspiring. What stood out about REDO was how they opened up spaces like post-war buildings that are normally inaccessible and created this whole experience that extended beyond a single theater or venue. That was powerful.

On the education side, I think what the Czechs are doing is amazing. The project Identita, which came out this year, is an incredible initiative. It brings together the history of Czech visual culture—graphic design, typography, its origins—and presents it in a way people can relate to as part of their cultural heritage.

And then there’s Poland, with a booming economy, countless studios working for the local market and shaping their environment. There’s also a network called NEED (Network Eastern European Design) that’s working to connect design event organisers from across the region—from Georgia, Ukraine, Serbia, Poland, Croatia, Slovenia—trying to build a shared community. They organize annual meetups with different agendas. I was at one in Warsaw and Vilnius, and recently met with René, the founder of the initiative in Krakow as well. It’s always so impressive how warm and familiar people are in our region.

POV’s long-term goals

We started with a very professionally focused audience—mostly design studios, identity design, branding professionals. This year, we’re trying to broaden that towards product teams, critical designers, speculative designers, and people who see themselves as more self-driven, not necessarily relying on client money. So it’s no longer just about the classic studio–client relationship.

Ideally, we’d like to expand even further, reaching a more mainstream audience and helping people better understand the visual culture around them.

Even people from our parents’ generation, who may not be close to design professionally—just helping them recognize that someone actually made the things they see every day. Like, the number plates on cars, the signage on streets, even the letters themselves were designed by someone. Once you start noticing that, you begin to care more about your environment.

Moving to an established design hub vs Developing your local scene

I don’t have a fear of missing out anymore because I basically started my career abroad, as soon as that was possible. After studying at Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest as a media designer and a short (and not very happy) experience in the world of advertising, I was accepted into Central Saint Martins in London, where I did a Master's in Graphic Communication Design. While studying, I worked in London in the field of social architecture, and I also had my first studio experience in Rotterdam, working with studio de Ronners. I freelanced back and forth with several London studios, and visited many others, where it was great to see how they actually worked. I had the chance to connect with people at places like Pentagram and Snøhetta. I also worked with FIELD.io, a London-based studio, and with Bleed Design Studio in Vienna.

All of these experiences led me to explore the freelance mindset. I started freelancing between Budapest and Vienna, at a time in my life when it was possible to work more flexibly. Then COVID hit, and like for many others, remote work opened up a lot of new possibilities. I started thinking about how I could expand, and bring in others with different skills to help realize some of my ideas. That’s when my wife and I moved back to Budapest and started a small design studio in the 6th district. It was just the two of us at first, but now we’re five, and recently we’ve occasionally joined forces with Comet Studio as well.

Coming home felt like arriving at something, almost like a mission I needed to follow. And that gives me energy every day. There’s something here I can call home, something I feel connected to, something I can own. That gives me a project for life.