Hamish Makgill talks us through designing the 2014 It's Nice That Annual

We were thrilled last week to announce the pre-order launch of the 2014 It’s Nice That Annual, our end-of-year book which rounds up 12 months of creative brilliance. This year it’s been designed by Brighton-based Studio Makgill and right from the off Hamish and his team were keen that we changed things up when it came to the book’s look and feel. We caught up with Hamish Makgill this week to talk about why it’s ok to be nice, the challenges of navigating so much eclectic visual material and that blue colour…

From the start you had a definite sense of the direction you wanted to the design to go in. Where did that come from?

I’ve obviously known about you guys from your start and I remember being involved on a panel about the future and what you were looking to do moving forward. I remember challenging you that you’re too nice; that there was never any cynicism and I wasn’t sure how you could conduct a point of view like that consistently. I’ve since had a complete 180 degree turn on that and actually realised it’s great that this is your point of view and that there’s someone out there doing it.

So by the time we came to look at this, my feeling was much more about celebrating that. It’s Nice That stands for totally unbridled optimism and that’s what we wanted to get into the book.

All designs have moments in them where you’ve got to push very hard against them to make sure you get it to the next stage, and then very occasionally a design comes along that doesn’t present that and you have to question why that is, but this is one of those. It just unfolded. We actually looked back at the first presentation and it’s also almost exactly as the idea was put down.

One of those things in the initial presentation was this really striking blue. What was the thinking behind that choice?

We wanted the colour to be quite innocent in a way. Lots of colours are tied up with thoughts and feelings and they mean something. So you have something orange and you’re immediately thinking of other brands, or if you put that in yellow you think about D&AD. So there were some places not to go with the colour, but we wanted it to feel clean and bright and that it didn’t feel too cool for itself.

Once we decided it was about making this blue thing, it’s not just a blue cover, it’s blue edges, it’s a blue object. And I hope people refer to it like ‘You know that one in the Annual, you know the blue one." It was there to give it an identity but was always a risk. When we first looked at it it was like “Is this going to work with photography – they’ve got so many different image colours and colour biases, will this present problems throughout it?”

I think importantly whenever we design something we’re not just all about what’s it going to look like, it’s how does this function? We would love this to be the tool that creative directors reach for when they want to find inspiration and those brilliant creatives to work with.

Another decision you guys pushed was to structure the work in the book in strict chronological order as to when it was posted on the site. That led to some really lovely coincidences of work being placed together that you might never have put on the same page…

Yes, but the opposite happened as well – there’s a couple of times where we wouldn’t choose to put these things together and that presented some design issues. But for the sake of making the thing work we got past that, so there’s nothing that stands out as a problem. But that decision to make it chronological forced us to look at how the book flows a lot more because we’d given ourselves these kind of shackles. We really had to work hard on the scale of images to keep the pace going and how they’re interrupted by the profiles.

I think naturally as designers we’re seeing how this feels as a flow; is there rhythm in there? And then it’s like what do we want to bring out? Because we can’t just say,’’It feels about time to have a large image so we’ll make that large.’ Not everything looks good big; not everything can handle it if the quality of the image isn’t up to it.

Tell us about the type choices – was that something that came together quickly?

There are two main typefaces in the book and they’re both versions of Futura. So on the cover you’ve got the Futura Extra Black and that is a sort of ubiquitous design type. It just works so, so well writing in that type and it was one of those things that once it was set in that, nothing else would look as good.

It’s a very beautiful typeface but it’s tough. You can throw it around and it’s got lots of history as well. It’s a real poster size typeface. Then to compliment that inside the book we used one of Paul Renner’s early cuts of Futura to make it a little more interesting, and that has a lot more character to it so it created a nice contrast.

Finally the decision to get 50 artists featured in the book to sign a postcard, one of which would feature on the cover posed some logistical challenges! How important to the final design are those postcards?

They’re essential. I wouldn’t feel at all the same about the book without the postcards; for me the statement doesn’t say anything if you don’t show what’s nice. What I love about the cover is that it shows nice stuff immediately, and more than that it means you’ve got 50 different covers and that’s where it ties up and works well. It’s a really simple idea.

The It’s Nice That Annual 2014 is supported by G.F Smith and printed on Colorplan Bright White 350gsm, Zen Pure White 150gsm and Heaven 42 135gsm.