An Extra Nice Year: On its first birthday, we celebrate our membership community

A year ago today, we at It’s Nice That set off on a new journey with the launch of Extra Nice, a global membership for anyone wanting to boost their own creativity, give back to the creative community, and to support It’s Nice That in the process as well. Now, to mark Extra Nice’s first anniversary, we’ve got a few exciting new updates.

First, we’re making Extra Nice more accessible to a broader number of people by lowering the annual cost and introducing a monthly payment tier. From today, members can choose to pay either an annual fee of £49.99 or a monthly subscription of £4.49. One of Extra Nice’s core purposes has always been to support creativity, so of course we want it to be as affordable as possible.

Regardless of how you decide to pay, you’ll get exactly the same benefits across the three pillars of Extra Nice. You’ll gain access to Extra Search, an inspirational way of exploring and enjoying the It’s Nice That archive; through Extra Access, you’ll get tickets to our virtual events and receive a fortnightly newsletter featuring insights from our editor-in-chief; and a portion of your fee will also go into the Extra Nice Fund, a pot of money that is put once a year towards a meaningful creative project produced by someone from our wider audience. You can read more about Extra Nice and what’s included in each of its pillars here.

The change in price isn’t the only thing we’re changing about Extra Nice, though. Very soon, we’re also going to be launching a new virtual event programme for the global Extra Nice community, so that no matter where in the world you live, as an Extra Nice member, you’ll still have regular access to inspiring speakers and insightful discussions. The team here at It’s Nice That is just finalising these plans now. Watch this space!

Sufficiently intrigued? Click on the button below to find out more and sign up for your own Extra Nice account. Otherwise keep on scrolling to learn about what we’ve done through Extra Nice over the past 12 months.

Extra Nice Fund

Part of our overarching mission at It’s Nice That is to help make the creative industry more diverse, so we always wanted to make sure Extra Nice contributed to this. That’s why we launched the Extra Nice Fund. As a member, 10 per cent of your joining fee goes directly into this fund, which is then put towards enabling a meaningful creative project aimed at improving diversity in the industry. To celebrate the launch of Extra Nice last year, we gave £1,000 to Okocha Obasi and their RaceZine project (you can read more about that initiative here). Now that Extra Nice has been running for a full year, we can open applications for the first proper contribution from the Extra Nice Fund. We’re going to be opening applications very soon, so keep an eye out for that announcement.

Pay It Forward

At the beginning of 2021, we announced a six-week initiative called Pay It Forward. For every person who joined Extra Nice between mid-February and the end of March, we donated an account to a young creative right at the start of their career. We worked with the charity Create Jobs and our sister company Creative Lives in Progress to identify these young creatives, who then got 12 months of access to Extra Nice completely free of charge. This Pay It Forward scheme was made possible thanks to a generous donation by Nalden, one of the original co-founders of WeTransfer.

Extra Access

Since last October, we’ve hosted 11 virtual Nicer Tuesdays events, which have seen us joined by some incredible speakers, global leaders in creativity such as Eric Hu, Edel Rodriguez, Annie Atkins, Jamie Hawkesworth and Paola Antonelli. Extra Nice members have received tickets for each of these events and learnt invaluable lessons and received heartening advice from these speakers. It’s been a wonderful way of staying connected to the global creative community, even through the pandemic’s toughest lockdowns. So, with Nicer Tuesdays at long last returning to a physical format at Oval Space in East London, we’re launching a new virtual event to replace this for our Extra Nice members.

In September, we also brought the London-based Extra Nice community together at the Tate Modern for an after-hours private view of the museum’s exhibition on Sophie Taeuber-Arp, the Swiss designer, artist and architect. This was the first time we’d actually been able to meet our Extra Nice community face-to-face due to the pandemic, and it was great to see so many people IRL for a change.

Extra Content

We’ve also sent out to our members 23 Extra Nice Newsletters, a fortnightly email that goes out just to members containing a debrief of goings-on in the creative world, penned by our editor-in-chief Matt Alagiah. Over the past year, this newsletter has featured interviews with the likes of illustrator Christoph Niemann; a discussion of the virtues of the four-day week; and an argument about why we should all move to the countryside. The newsletter also contains a segment called Supporter Spotlight, where we highlight a recent project by an Extra Nice member and showcase it to the rest of the community.

Extra It’s Nice That

Extra Nice is of course about supporting the creative community around you, but it’s also about showing your love for It’s Nice That as an independent publisher. Every person who signs up for Extra Nice is also helping us to do what we do best – tell great stories about creativity and showcase the best new creative talent from all over the world.

Over the past 12 months, we’ve published three editorial series that were made possible by Extra Nice. The first was Conscious Creativity, a series of opinion pieces exploring how a more conscious approach to creativity is needed, now more than ever. The second was Design Legacies, which took an in-depth look at three modern design icons and how they came to shape our cultural landscape. And the third series was the most ambitious: The Power of Storytelling with Yinka Ilori. For the first time ever, we at It’s Nice That handed the reins to a guest editor – in this case, the artist and designer Yinka Ilori, who then worked with us to publish a beautiful series of 10 features shaped by his unique personality, perspective and creative eye.

These three series made possible by Extra Nice represent the very best of what It’s Nice That is all about: championing and supporting creativity in all its forms. As an independent publisher, we would certainly not be able to create ambitious series like this without the support of our Extra Nice members. So, as a last note, we want to say a huge thank-you to those of you who have already signed up to Extra Nice – your support is massively appreciated – and we want to ask anyone who has thought about it in the past to once again consider joining this community.