-
She’s back! Gracia Lam, born in Hong Kong and now living in Canada, has updated her portfolio with some delights. Still in her brilliant style we loved so much last year, you cannot deny Gracia is consistently hitting the nail on the head. Her portfolio is brimming with impressive clients like The New Yorker and Random House, and she has won a bunch of awards too. Simple with surprising depth, her illustrations are colourful yet do not detract from the brief given – it definitely seems like no challenge is too big for Gracia.
-
British music festivals take note, this is the second excellent identity for a Scandinavian festival we’ve featured this week.THIS WEEK. Those Norwegians are having a blinder. The first came from Santtu Mustonen and Flow festival and this one arrived direct from Non-Format, who have produced a selection of anthropomorphic robotic faces for this year’s Only Connect Festival of Sound, this year themed around Machine Dreams. The illustration and design work is all top notch and we must confess we’re excited by the programme, which looks like a covetable piece of print in its own right. Come on Glastonbury, you know what to do; that little ring of dancing men won’t cut it forever.
-
Advertisement
-
Not often does a video simultaneously make James Cartwright admit feel that he’d rather be a girl than a boy (finally) and also make me genuinely want to participate in competitive sport, but this one did. This was released a few months back, but because I only ever witnessed it in the five seconds before a YouTube clip until I could skip it, it meant it was never watched in full. The first time I actually did, I watched it three times in a row.
-
Ahoy there students! We’ve got another announcement for you. You know how just there other day we launched our Represent-sponsored The Graduates 2013? In all the excitement you probably thought we’d forgotten about Student of The Month didn’t you? But we haven’t – not at all – and in the relentless fashion of one of our favourite monthly features it’s back for May 2013. As ever, the deadline is tight (you’ve got until next Tuesday, May 28) but we’ve got every faith in you, so get sending in your work!
-
Please welcome very busy image-maker Mr Chad Kouri. Tirelessly juggling about a hundred projects at once, Chad is a good example of someone whose work/play life is as one. His consistent swapping of mediums makes him one of Chicago’s most impressive commercial multimedia artists. He’s also a bit of a dab hand at typography. Here he is, let us introduce Chad Kouri…
-
Our intern Holly Wilkins talks about the current status of gardening and how the Chelsea Flower Show, which often ticks all the boxes of an art and design exhibition, can sometimes fall on deaf ears.
-
Last year studio Fons Hickmann M23 produced a beautiful yearbook for Dresden’s Semperoper, interspersing beautiful photographs and engravings of the city’s history with bold geometric shapes; transforming a severe monochrome landscape with bursts of colour and texture. This year they’ve done it again, moving the concept one step further with geometric collages of Dresden fused with other locations across the globe – creating strange patterns that function as optical illusions. As ever, the accompanying design is first rate but it’s the commissioned images that really steal the show.
-
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.
-
It’s been ages since we featured any of Ping Zhu’s work, which means (because she’s a supremely in-demand, freelance-illustrating genius) that she’s got an absolute shed-load of updates on her site. Since we last met Ping’s been working for Plansponsor, The New York Times and The New Yorker on an almost weekly basis it seems, in between whiles finding time to put together an impressive installation at this year’s Pick Me Up and fill up a home-made sketchbook with work that she’s documenting on her blog. Because of this slavish attitude to work Ping’s illustration just keeps on getting better – and we were big fans in the first place. Hopefully we’ll be seeing her on the cover of The New Yorker soon!
-
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.
-
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.
-
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:
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
