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Very happy to welcome Slugabed back to It’s Nice That with the video for his new single Bombok, released to coincide with the launch of his new record label, Activia Benz. The word Bombok alone conjures up memories of the word bombastic and the feel of most Thai beach resorts, so it comes as no surprise that this video is nice, seizure-inducing a mixture of the two.
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It’s not often we feature a fashion shoot on It’s Nice That, but when we do, they are pretty spectacular. Edie Campbell (away from her usual light hues) dons jet black hair and the smokiest eyes I’ve ever seen for a US Vogue’s June 2013 shoot in Morocco, shot by well known photographer Peter Lindbergh. There is a loose story line following a lone traveller through Morocco and is rather unlike other fashion shoots, mainly due to the charming compositions detracting your gaze away from the clothes to the surrounding environment of mosaic tiles and desert landscape.
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It’s certainly not often that online dating references make us do anything other than cringe on our morning commute (I’m looking at you hand-drawn type and soft-focus record player) but please welcome an absolute game-changer from Channel 4! Meet Arthur, the grieving tortoise who, after losing his wife in the zoo in which they’ve shared a life together, goes on the hunt for a new companion.
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A recent graduate from Pratt in New York, Anthony Cudahy has an incredible talent when it comes to painting. Using the gouache method, Anthony’s pieces are romantic and fluid with the lively brush strokes and large blocks of colour suggesting a sense of ambiguity. Anthony explains his concept in the statement below:
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The Antarctic is a terrifying place; a barren wasteland of desolate white that readily claims the lives of those that don’t respect it. I’ve not been, of course, but I’ve heard the rumours; it’s trouble. In stark contrast to the harsh reality of surviving there is its striking natural beauty. In among all that freezing white are beautiful textures and strange natural patterns that seem to mask the underlying danger.
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If you haven’t yet seen Anton Alvare’s spectacular thread-wrapped furniture, you’re in for a treat. With the typical RCA-graduate mix of staggering intelligence and creativity in one go, Anton now spends his time constructing incredible furniture utilising machines that he designs and builds himself. Not bad, eh? His bookshelf is, unsurprisingly, an incredibly enjoyable read. Until, of course, you reach the bit about the limited edition Misaki Kawai book, then you just find yourself wondering how best to break an enter into his home.
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It’s nice when animation and education come together to produce something that’s really engaging rather than just pure eye-candy. Suddenly you’re struck by the ability of a such a fluid medium to communicate messages quickly and concisely without you even realising you’re learning. So it is in the case of Part and Parcel’s latest work for The Ford Foundation, Time To Succeed, a short animation that proposes a reform to the American education system. It’s a simple, unfussy look at something that many of us will know nothing about, but by the end you’ll find yourself agreeing with the message wholeheartedly.
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Nope these guys aren’t Canadian, they are the Spanish collective founded in 2008 by directors Luis Cerveró, Nicolás Méndez and Lope Serrano with the intention of producing their own work under the umbrella label CANADA. The three directors work alongside producers Oscar Romagosa and Alba Barneda to create commercials for big clients such as Adidas and Sony.
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New York City is one of those places, like London, where there are just too many people and at any point you may suddenly be engulfed by a mass of tourists, commuters and others about their daily business. This is when Amani Willett takes the opportunity to capture the dynamics of your average crowd, revealing a world of outrage, frustration and solemn expressions. Amani believes “the beauty of a photograph is that it can compel us to re-examine seemingly mundane scenes and events of everyday life.” With compositions you wouldn’t think would work, touché Amani.
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Can you recall your final hours before the D&AD deadline? Were your sweating, shaking hands clutching a blunt scalpel in a last, desperate attempt to get that binder as perfect as possible? Horrible. Scott Carthy and Ben Pender on the other hand were probably two pints deep at the SU at this point, laughing about their absolute triumph of a film.
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Poor balance and an inability to wear beanies convincingly has always kept me from skateboarding. As a naive teenager I once pinched a friend’s deck for all of five minutes before planting my chin on tarmac and giving up the idea of ollies and kick flips forever (I’ve still got the lingo though, am I right!?). Still, there’s a part of me that’s painfully aware that I missed out on some good vibes by forgoing skateboarding in my formative years and these images from Richard Gilligan rub salt in that smarting wound.
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Nothing intrigues us more than a crazy criminal, and the same can be said for Sean Lewis, whose intricate illustrations are of the dark humour variety. Hailing from Toronto, Sean won the gold medal at The Ontario College of Art and Design for these drawings of dangerous outlaws and that is no surprise. Whether they depict Andreas Yates who suffered from dementia and, under a warped religious vision, drowned her children in the tub or John Torrio, a well-known Italian mobster in New York City, these richly coloured illustrations infuse just the right amount of monstrous and darn right beguiling.
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What more could you ask for on a boring Tuesday than a creative three-way collaboration between some of the world’s most up-and-coming designers? These silky, foldy, layered scenes are the result of severafrahm, JAG Zoeppritz and Aesthetics Habitat putting their creative minds to work and coming up with these strange dream-like sets.
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I could try and explain this to you using some wacky It’s Nice That jargon, but to be honest the blurb beneath Tom Jobbins incredible mixed-media video sums it up better than I ever could. “In 1977 NASA sent a Golden Record into space. It encapsulated the greatest achievements of humanity, and included photographs of its species. One of these photos is of Larry, he hopes this will propel him to
the status of Earth Ambassador. This is Larry’s intergalactic story of life and love.” And what a story! Tom is seriously good at animation, so to combine this talent with the tale of humans catapulting a golden record of their achievements into the stratosphere is a winning combo. Definitely worth a watch! -
Jacopo Servitano, a graphic designer from Germany, has designed these brilliant posters and flyers for Rome-based party promotors Beat Up! Striking to say the least, these colourful graphics have a wide range of inspiration, from art deco to geometry. Jacopo also likes to play with symmetry in his illustrations, adding a subtle simplicity to the designs. With promotional posters like these, you’ll be hitting up Beat Up!‘s parties all the time – looks like I’m coming to Rome!
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It’s not very often that grown women and men alike can be reduced to tears with a few select lines of heartfelt prose, rarer still that that prose should develop into a superbly illustrated graphic novel, the contents of which are by turns heartbreaking and hilarious. But Anders Nilsen has managed to create such a work; a rare beast of autobiographic narrative that’s both deeply tragic and wonderfully life-affirming.
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They say that girl power died when the Spice Girls’ Viva Forever was cancelled due to bad ticket sales , but nuh uh! Ryan Kenny smashes up anti-girl power theories with his trusty camera that basically turns every girl it fires a shot at into a hilarious, roll-up smoking, rock diving, water fight starting, firework lighting girl.
