Work / Uncategorized

Jeremy Deller, Clip Art and the It’s Nice That annual in this week’s podcast

Words by Liv Siddall, Friday 05 December 2014

This week we chat about the It’s Nice That Annual, Jeremy Deller’s encounter with Andy Warhol and waving a sad goodbye to the much-loved Microsoft feature: Clip Art.

As ever you can listen using he SoundCloud embed below or subscribe via iTunes here.

Int_cop2_grande — The It’s Nice That Annual 2014

Jeremy Deller and Andy Warhol. Photo courtesy of The Guardian

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This year feels like it was over before it even began – which is a total cliché but it’s God’s honest truth. It feels like just yesterday I was launched blinking and hungover into the first days of 2014 and now I couldn’t really tell you what I got up to. Anyway, it was a whirlwind, a rollercoaster ride full of emotional ups and downs, physical highs and lows, triumphs of spirit and ingestions of spirits. Yeah 2014, you were alright, I liked you, though at times you were a bit of a t**t.

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Work / Uncategorized ECAL's website MAAD is a comprehensive archive of their MA in Art Direction

You could be forgiven for taking a cursory glance over the MAAD site, as I did, and assuming that it was dedicated to a design collective more diverse and comprehensive than we’d ever even seen before. Because that it kind of what it looks like. In fact, MAAD stands for Masters in Art Direction and belongs to ECAL, aka the Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne, in Switzerland, and the website serves as both a pamphlet for prospective students and an archive for the projects of previous ones, making it one of the best thought out university sites that we’ve ever seen.

Maisie Skidmore — 04 November 2014
Work / Uncategorized We love Tom Sewell's lunar calendar for his residency over on Post Matter

The difference between artists and normal proles is shown in the ease at which an artist can convey a very simple idea with visuals to make it shine. For instance this new work by our much-loved local artist Tom Sewell, in which he created a 31-day lunar chart when asked by digital art blog Post Matter to take part in a month-long residency. To me, Tom’s work is like having a toe constantly submerged in anonymous, otherworldly fluid – he takes the online world and melts it down until it resembles pools of history, typography and coding all glooped together into one. This series of serene planet GIFs gives me the same ambient pleasure as my desktop Mountain, and I’m going to keep up with this lunar July calendar even though it’s August tomorrow.

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Ryo Kuwabara is a master colour coordinator and a geometric genius: scrolling through his Tumblr page, it’s kind of unbelievable when you realise that he has designed every single one of the decorative, eye-popping posters in the spectacular online portfolio. His work is space age but also early computer age, composed out of highly artificial patterns and rounded shapes that contain just a hint of Keith Haring. I’m not entirely sure what the posters are for, as the only English words that I can decipher are “Circuit Disarray” and “Blink” and “Symphony of the form,” but I do think that all of these words are very evocative of Ryo’s fantastically playful designs.

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Work / Uncategorized The new issue of art, culture and surfing magazine WAX has launched with a bang!

You don’t get much cooler than a fluorescent publication about art and surfing produced in Brooklyn, but luckily WAX magazine has proved itself not to just be another trendy rag, but a bonafide pleasure for all who see it. Take, for example, Printed Pages editor James Cartwright’s reaction when it plopped into the It’s Nice That offices the other day – he squealed like a little piggy and ripped off its plastic binding to flick through its fresh, untouched pages.

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“I have no idea what I’m doing,” begins illustrator Melek Zertal on the topic of how she discovered her practice. “I like drawing, but when I do it I get bored and wonder if I wouldn’t be better off making clothes or music videos.” The Algerian-born, Parisian-raised artist has a nonchalant attitude towards her practice that belies the work itself, which is at once soft and striking.

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Three months after starting his BFA in Drawing at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Wyatt Knowles discovered collage and spent most of his time doing that instead. During this time he also started making posters and flyers for the bands he and his friends were in: “I think I enjoyed the freedom and contrast of just making this sort of throw-away thing, in comparison to the big conceptual ideas I had to have for my university work,” he tells It’s Nice That.

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In the first half of the 1990s, before the term “cultural appropriation” was a widely understood concept, a group of 20-something Asian Americans were seeking to improve their visibility. Gathering together in Los Angeles’ media capital with two Macintosh LC’s (those old solid beige blocks of computers,) and an edition of QuarkXPress (otherwise known as InDesign’s great-great-grandma), a magazine priding itself on expressing unheard stories from the East and South-East Asian diaspora in the US was formed. That magazine, was Yolk. A one of a kind title in its celebration of Asian and Asian American identity, Yolk ran from 1994 to 2003. Since then, not a single publication has come close to rivalling its mantel for championing people of Asian descent. It was innovative in its art direction, experimental layouts and not to mention its original content. It featured interviews with highly visible film directors such as Ang Lee, to features on lesser-known creatives like Pedro Flores, the inventor of the Yo-yo. Yolk created a platform not only for Asian faces but for wide spanning editorial storytelling and cutting-edge graphic design, highlighting ten years of Asian creativity during a period of very little non-white representation in the mainstream media.

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It's Nice That — 15 February 2019
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Lucy Bourton — 14 February 2019
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“I was apprehensive at first about doing a photography project in Tanzania,” explains the photographer Lucy Pullicino. “Coming from a place of white privilege and being an outsider to the community” the photographer consciously questioned her position on the project before embarking on the beautiful series titled The Bikers of Esso Road; documenting motorcycle-taxis in Arusha.

Jyni Ong — 14 February 2019
Sponsored / Digital Dropbox launches new blog vocalising its unique point of view on work culture

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It's Nice That — 14 February 2019
Work / Illustration Everpress’ “slimy love slug” inspired Valentine’s campaign is a wide-ranging vision of love ‘n’ lust

This year, to mark the beloved Saint Valentine’s Day, ethical fashion platform Everpress has asked nine of its favourite artists, illustrators, animators and designers to respond to the day in the form of a T-Shirt. Everpress recognises that there’s a range of responses to Valentine’s Day, from unbridled joy to tears or bitter laments – and “it’s come to be defined largely by overpriced menus and empty Hallmark sentiments”. As a result the collection, titled Love is the Message, takes it back-to-basics, “observing the day as it is and was, as a celebration of romance”.

Billie Muraben — 14 February 2019

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“Daily, through our screens, we see accumulations of information overload about climate change,” states graphic designer David Loy. “Our visual landscape is full of climate disasters, political debate and global warming impacts. It gave me the unusual sensation that it had become almost commonplace.” Spurred on by this fact, David created Heat an in-depth project which explores global warming and its long-term effects away from mass media.

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Daniel Milroy Maher — 14 February 2019
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Jyni Ong — 13 February 2019
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Billie Muraben — 13 February 2019
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Jyni Ong — 13 February 2019

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Billie Muraben — 13 February 2019
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It's Nice That — 13 February 2019
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Ruby Boddington — 13 February 2019
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It's Nice That — 12 February 2019
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For Los Angeles-based artist Hiejin Yoo, painting is much more than an act of creative practice, instead describing her process like writing in “an intimate journal and meditations on self discovery,” she tells It’s Nice That. Combining both personal experiences and details from the world around her, the result is a body of work that is touching in its detail, however simple the objects she is painting may be.

Lucy Bourton — 12 February 2019
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Lucy Bourton — 12 February 2019