Mysterious blue fluid has become a staple of sanitary product advertising, but in a new ad for Bodyform and Libresse this has been shunned in favour of a scientifically accurate and recognisable red. The #BloodNormal campaign by agency AMV BBDO and director Daniel Wolfe, with cinematography by Monika Lenczewska, is the first to ignore taboo and show that women bleed “real blood” during their period.

Throughout 2017, Camden Council have been running a programme of cultural events to mark the 50th anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act (1967), which saw the partial decriminalisation of male homosexuality in the UK. To celebrate, we’ve teamed up with Camden Council and asked four brilliant LGBTQ creatives to join us for 50 Years On: one night at Central St Martins, Granary Square on Wednesday 1 November to speak about their work across art, design, fashion and film through the lens of their personal experiences, asking what it means to identify as LGBTQ in the creative industry in the UK – and wider world – 50 years on.

As a designer who once built and destroyed a life-size monster truck hearse; contributed to the New York Times; and having taught at the School for Visual Arts for the past 13 years, Paul Sahre is regarded as most of the most influential graphic designers of his generation. Two Dimensional Man: A Graphic Memoir is his unique take on a traditional design monograph – “part memoir, part art book, part mediation on creativity.”

Jamie Williams is a partner at London-based independent creative agency Isobel. Here, he asks, how can we connect young diverse talent with the agencies who crave it?

“How do you get into advertising?” I’ve heard this question a lot, but equally important questions to ask are “Why get into advertising?” or “Should I get into advertising?” So let’s start there.

Advertising and the wider creative industries are changing quicker than almost any other industry. There are so many different ways for brands to engage with consumers, only the best agencies and marketers stay ahead of the game.

The industry is always on the look-out for something new. Fresh ideas, a new approach, new insights, new trends, new technology, new talent. While experience and knowledge are absolutely crucial in our industry, they need to be mixed with new thinking and new approaches.

I’ve sat through enough uninspiring presentations on youth marketing to know that utilising the thinking and energy of young people is of great importance to agencies.

So for young people, I think our industry is an incredibly exciting one, jam-packed with diverse opportunities, within creative, design, strategy, tech, project management, and that’s just the start. And if you do well, you can move up remarkably quickly.

We don’t have formal operating qualifications like medicine or law. Some young people see this as a negative, but it means that in theory, anyone can make it in advertising. While the range of advertising and marketing courses available are all beneficial, as are wider degrees and diplomas, some of the most successful people in our industry have very little traditional education. Once you’re in, it’s how well you perform that matters.

But having said all of this, I know our industry often doesn’t feel very accessible.

From the outside, advertising has always had a glamorous image. However far from the truth it may be, it’s an industry associated with celebrities, fame, money, and the bright lights of London.

There are great agencies and opportunities throughout the country, but London is where the main action is, where most of the jobs are, and it’s a pricey place to live. If you live a long way from London, getting into advertising can seem a long way off.

Ricky Leung’s work is often inspired by the idea of “slow living”, with a sustainable, local and organic approach to everyday life being both “intriguing and beautiful” to the illustrator. “Travelling, interior deign, film photography and food are things I love… I want to convey those feelings and imagery through a light-hearted and playful way.”

Although it’s not even been a year since Donald Trump was elected as president, with his questionable decision making hitting headlines daily, it feel like a lifetime. But behind the man, the quiff, and the jokes is ultimately a nation heartbreakingly divided.

Seoul-based graphic designer Shrimp Chung became intrigued by design after playing “tons of computer games and surfing the internet” as a child. The digital world for Shrimp seemed unlimited and unrestricted by boundaries unlike the physical world. “I was fascinated by the concept of being able to manipulate all visual materials and create my own world within the screen through graphics tools,” she explains. “In my early teens I used Photoshop to make photographic collages and moving images. Later I went on to study visual communications at university and have been working in it ever since.”

Choreographer and director Holly Blakey taught the Nicer Tuesdays audience the benefits of stepping outside your direct medium, and how this can help you to learn about your practice, as well as the wider repercussions of it.

Elise By Olsen started blogging aged eight, and by the time she was 12 she’d founded a blog network with a fistful of similarly entreprenial friends called Archetype, whose vision was to tie together young bloggers across art, music, photography and fashion under one vertical.

Growing up with a photographer for a father and a darkroom in his basement, it seems only natural that Brooklyn-based Michael Marcelle would eventually have a go at the medium himself. “He’d always give me cameras and rolls of film and set me loose in the backyard and then we’d develop the film together downstairs – which was equal parts thrilling and scary because I was totally terrified of the basement when I was a kid,” Michael told us.

Books From The Future is a London-based publisher working at the intersection of research, education and publishing founded by educators Yvan Martinez and Joshua Trees. The pair started Books From The Future as a way to explore the models used to structure contemporary art and design education that are “no longer relevant yet have become so institutionalised and internalised that alternatives can seem wildly idealistic and unrealistic by comparison.”

Beauty Papers is a biannual magazine spearheaded by creative duo Maxine Leonard and Valerie Wickes, offering an outlet to liberate creative beauty and “give beauty a brave new face". The publication tackles, through a series of articles and editorials, the complexities of modern beauty with a focus on “freeing it from its formulaic shackles,” to offer a new, more contemporary definition. “The beauty discussion is no longer just reserved for hushed conversations about classical painting or a particular Holloway star or model,” the duo explain. “It’s now served up on a daily, minute by minute digital basis and is enmeshed in our lives.”

It is no secret that we are fond of Molly Matalon. Whether we’re writing about the LA-based photographer or commissioning her ourselves when working on something across the pond, her tenderly composed images impress us every time — or maybe we’re just endlessly envious of the sun-filled photographs she produces.

Laura Callaghan took to the Nicer Tuesday’s stage in September, taking the audience on a journey through her illustration career. Coming from a small town in Ireland, — “their best known cultural output so far is The Corrs, that’s what I have to live up to” — moving to England in 2009 for a masters in illustration at Kingston University.

Earlier this month It’s Nice That pitched up at A/D/O in Greenpoint, Brooklyn to present an evening of talks by two of our Graduates 2017 and two fantastic creatives who live and work in New York. Illustrator and animator Katy Wang and graphic designer Ben Hutchings were joined by graphic designers Anna Kulachek and Braulio Amado to share insights into their work and processes with short, punchy presentations.

Each season as a new issue of Fantastic Man is released, conversation ensues around who it has chosen for its cover. What the publication has always done — whether it be featuring Bryan Ferry, Christopher Waltz or Jeremy Deller — is choose someone you wouldn’t quite expect but equally someone you adore, or will do once you’ve finished reading. However, the most recent cover features five men we would be surprised if you recognise: five male surfers from Peniche, Portugal. 

What Makes Grass Grow in The Desert is an ongoing, explorative project by photographer James Bannister aiming to reveal the cracks in Las Vegas’ facade of success and glamour. James uses photography to “expose the gap between what we would like people to see and the image that we actually project,” a gap that Diane Arbus once described as “the gap between intention and effect”. In terms of Las Vegas, James uses his camera to explore the disparity between the vision that the casino hotel owners want us to see, the sparseness of the natural environment and its poorer communities that tend to inhabit these areas.

We’ve previously championed the work of Daniel Fletcher, a master of curating shapes together in a way that make you feel fuzzy and warm with their considered simplicity. Daniel has started to gradually step away from illustration transferring his work to canvas, but with the same prepossessing qualities of his older work.