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Championing creativity

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Work / Miscellaneous

Cracking Instagram hack This Is Now allows you to view the rest of the world in real time

Words by James Cartwright, Thursday 02 August 2012

Image aggregators are nothing new and it’s fair to say we’re literally inundated with personal photos shared online, whether through social media, email or just posted on websites. Today alone I’ve witnessed about 100 different images of people’s lunchtime snacks. Personal digital photography is here to stay and the increasing quality of cameras in phones is doing nothing to halt its worldwide progression. But isn’t it all getting a bit boring?

Heck no! And to prove it take a look at This Is Now a live feed of Instagram shots from five of the world’s greatest capital cities uploaded in real time according to the geotag of each image. Want to know what’s happening in Tokyo right now? Fireworks, cats, cakes and lager. How about Sao Paulo? Bikinis, snakes newborn babies and some dude in shades who’s clearly quite keen on his abs. You can also keep tabs on the people of London (Olympics), Sydney (beaches) and New York (pizza).

It may not be the most groundbreaking use of the internet, and there’s still an enormous number of food photos knocking around, but what an incredible way of keeping up to date with the habits of people outside of your own city-wide bubble. And we’ll be damned if it doesn’t highlight the awesome volume of people using Instagram as if it were as important to their existence as breathing. Truly impressive stuff.

www.now.jit.su

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Sophy Hollington on learning to be creatively fulfilled while earning a living in 2018 13 December 2018
Same Paper and KangHee Kim's latest book is a golden journey from dawn to dusk 13 December 2018
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It's Nice That — 04 December 2018
Work / Miscellaneous Raw Color expands its colour-focused practice into 3D “props”

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Jyni Ong — 23 November 2018
Work / Miscellaneous PlayLab, Inc. says it doesn't “want to do the same thing twice” in its practice

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Jyni Ong — 14 November 2018
Sponsored / Miscellaneous We've picked our favourite entries from A/D/O's Water Future Design Challenge

Earlier in 2018, A/D/O launched the Water Futures Design Challenge. It was an attempt to get designers and creators to begin conceptualising and imagining innovative new ways in which we can start thinking about solutions to the (currently) toxic attitude many of us have toward drinking water. The crisis is now global, and A/D/O want each and every one of us to consider reimagining our destructive drinking water culture and contemplate designing alternative realities.

Sponsored Content — 11 October 2018
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Regulars / Nicer Tuesdays Francesca Allen on using photography as a means of self-expression

Joining us at November’s Nicer Tuesdays was photographer Francesca Allen, a creative who has had a fast-paced career full of memorable moments, of which she creates just as many behind the camera as she does in front of it.

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Regulars / Review of the Year 2018 Sophy Hollington on learning to be creatively fulfilled while earning a living in 2018

During parts of 2018 it almost felt like you couldn’t look at a magazine, bookshelf or website without spotting the work of illustrator Sophy Hollington. Her body of work — one that’s elevated the art of linocutting beyond hazy memories of art classes into a sought after stylistic medium — has the ability to transform any written piece it often seems to accompany. This is down to Sophy’s illustrative talents of course, but also her consideration of the task at hand, steeping her process in research, thematic influences and a genuine interest of exploring what visual imagery can do.

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Ruby Boddington — 13 December 2018
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Work / Graphic Design Studio Albert Romagosa’s publication designs are uncomplicated yet intelligible

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It's Nice That — 12 December 2018
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Jyni Ong — 12 December 2018
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Ruby Boddington — 12 December 2018

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Ruby Boddington — 12 December 2018
Work / Graphic Design Blok rethinks the design of cannabis after its legalisation in Canada

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Jyni Ong — 12 December 2018
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Josh Baines — 12 December 2018
Work / Publication “I’m a believer in form”: Geoff McFetridge on his new book of introspective drawings

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Matt Alagiah — 11 December 2018
Regulars / Nicer Tuesdays A rundown of our Nicer Tuesdays highlights of 2018

On the last Tuesday of every month this year, we and 400 other creative fanatics headed down to Oval Space in East London to watch four practitioners tell us about themselves and their work. With 44 talks done and four more to follow next week, this year’s Nicer Tuesdays has been full of often hilarious, sometimes serious but – ultimately – always insightful talks.

It's Nice That — 11 December 2018
Regulars / Review of the Year 2018 Eight creatives from around the world tell us what made their city tick in 2018

Here at It’s Nice That, we’re dedicated to keeping our approach to creativity resolutely global. As societies at large start to feel increasingly unstable, uncertain, and atomised, it is more important than ever to consider how to foster a sense of likemindedness across the creative industries, remembering that borders don’t have to exist in the way we’re told they do.

Josh Baines — 11 December 2018

Work / Illustration “Are we all avatars now?” asks digital painter Zak Keene

London-based illustrator Zak Keene trained as an architect and consequently has self-professed “OCD compulsions”. In architecture, “everything has to be precise to the millimetre”, Zak tells It’s Nice That. If measurements aren’t accurate, somewhere down the line “it could lead to big complications and the builders could call to say the staircase doesn’t reach the second floor!” Zak has become obsessed with the smallest details in his illustration work. His hyperreal digital drawings utilise architectural ratios that see the work totally to scale. When working, Zak asks himself, “am I drawing a 1:1, intimate close up of a hand clutching an object? Or am I drawing a zoomed out elevation encompassing an entire scene with figures against a landscape?”

Jyni Ong — 11 December 2018
Work / Photography Mohamad Abdouni on documenting an “important time in Arab queer culture”

“The way it currently stands, we as queer Arabs don’t have extensive (if any) documentation of our queer past and tend to refer to the West for reference and history,” explains Beirut born-and-raised photographer, filmmaker and editor-in-chief of Cold Cuts magazine, Mohamad Abdouni. Through both his commissioned and personal work, Mohamad is looking to change this fact, documenting the community he is apart of, and the culture it is beginning to thrive within.

Ruby Boddington — 11 December 2018
Sponsored / Product Design MUJI talks us through the brand’s famously minimal design aesthetic

MUJI may well be a recognisable high-street brand today but few people know much about the company’s history. The brand was born in 1980s Japan, when the country’s so-called “economic miracle” was coming to an end and people were massively cutting back on their spending. As the MUJI team puts it, the company was founded in this unique environment “as an antithesis to the habits of extreme consumer society”. It’s an ethos that still resonates today.

Sponsored Content — 11 December 2018
Work / Graphic Design Hitesh Malaviya on the challenges of designing type for an Indian audience

“I think India is the most diverse country in the world”, says freelance type designer Hitesh Malaviya. “We have 29 states and almost every state has a different language and culture. People in India currently speak about 780 languages, written in 11 different scripts.” Compared to type designers dealing with latin glyphs, designers like Rocky — as Hitesh is known to his friends — who design fonts for an Indian audience face the challenge of perfecting around 750 to 800 glyphs in each font and weight.

Jyni Ong — 11 December 2018
Regulars / Review of the Year 2018 Little Pyongyang director Roxy Rezvany reflects on what constitutes a successful year

You can’t have failed to notice North Korea’s presence in the news this year. With Donald Trump large and in charge from his Mar-a-Lago golf course and Kim Jong-Un burrowed away in deepest Pyongyang, it’s been 12 months of escalating tensions interspersed with the occasional period of quiet relief.

Josh Baines — 11 December 2018
Work / Graphic Design Multi-faceted designers Studio Bergini hops between projects with a cool, clean elegance

A few weeks back now, on a particularly gloomy Sunday, It’s Nice That found themselves ambling around Hackney Wick. We were on our way to a friend’s birthday party at a beanbag-filled audiophile bar and took a wrong turning. Nestled amongst the greys and browns of a part of London that’s still not quite sure how redeveloped it wants to be, we heard the gentle hum of old printers whirring away into the heavy afternoon air.

Josh Baines — 11 December 2018

Work / Illustration For Ginko Yang “drawing creates the same effects as a mental massage”

Designer Ginko Yang was born in a semitropical town of Southern China. A few years later, she spent five years in Beijing before embarking on a new creative adventure in London. But it seems that no matter where Ginko is based, the act of “drawing creates the same effects as a mental massage," she tells It’s Nice That, and, as a result, Ginko’s turned her attention away from graphic design to illustration, after years of working as a magazine designer.

Jyni Ong — 10 December 2018
Regulars / Review of the Year 2018 Pop culture powerhouse Bryan Rivera's 2018 in graphic design

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Jyni Ong — 10 December 2018
Regulars / Review of the Year 2018 Don't worry, be angry: how politics and creativity collided in 2018

In the first of our Review of the Year op-eds, It’s Nice That editor Matt Alagiah casts an eye over the interplay between politics and creativity over the past 12 months.

Matt Alagiah — 10 December 2018
Work / Animation Maurice Andresen is reimagining Glasgow’s non-spaces as an ethereal world

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Jyni Ong — 10 December 2018
Work / Publication Vice magazine's creative team talks us through its new and unexpectedly different redesign

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Lucy Bourton — 10 December 2018
Work / Photography Julia Falkner and Lorena Hydeman document boys playing with gender for the first time

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Ruby Boddington — 10 December 2018

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