From hieroglyphics to pizza pop-ups, how to make a side project successful

Find out about two side hustles – courtesy of Kate Prior and Archief Cairo – in this recap of what happened at May’s edition of Nicer Tuesdays.

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Over the years we’ve seen all kinds of side projects grace It’s Nice That, from the weird to the wonderful and pretty much everything in between. Particularly this past year, we’ve seen how side projects have kept creatives going. With no time limit or commercial or client constraints, they frequently afford creatives a breather from their day-to-day work and feed into their practice in surprising ways. So, we wanted to take the opportunity of May’s Nicer Tuesdays Online to celebrate these extra-curricular activities.

With an abundance of side projects to choose from, we decided to focus on two very special (and very different) side projects. Spotlighting design collective Archief Cairo and illustrator Kate Prior, we virtually journeyed from London over to the Egyptian capital and back again to London for this month’s edition of creative talks. Our speakers talked us through two tremendously exciting projects. First, Archief Cairo co-founders Maram Al Refaei and Hana Neuman took us through their project, which sees the collective restoring old letterpresses at Cairo’s French Institute of Oriental Archaeology, a museum which houses the only caseroom with hieroglyphics in the world.

Then we were joined by the London-based Kate Prior who swapped her illustration tools for cheffing over the lockdown. Having moved to a new area just as the world started to close its doors, Kate and her partner Ugo set up a pop-up pizza joint as a way to get to know their neighbours, with a range of exciting visuals to accompany the new venture. In a Q&A with our editor-in-chief Matt Alagiah, Kate talked us through the details of this project touching on the community values at its heart.

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Archief Cairo: القلب © كل الحقوق محفوظة مع تحياتي—DO NOT COPY HEART ©, 2019 (Copyright © Archief Cairo)

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Kate Prior: Short Road Pizza (Copyright © Kate Prior, 2020)

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Archief Cairo: القلب © كل الحقوق محفوظة مع تحياتي—DO NOT COPY HEART ©, 2019 (Copyright © Archief Cairo)

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Kate Prior: Short Road Pizza (Copyright © Kate Prior, 2020)

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Kate Prior: Short Road Pizza (Copyright © Kate Prior, 2020)

Reviving the world’s only letterpress with hieroglyphics in Cairo

“Cairo is one of the most diverse, dynamic cities out there,” said Maram, as Archief Cairo took to the online stage. “It triggers all of your senses. It’s unpredictable.” The co-founder kicked off Nicer Tuesdays with an introduction to the collective’s multi-layered practice overlapping research, preservation and communication. Founded in 2018 while at university, the collective started out as an attempt to discover Cairo’s non-academic design scene from a micro-perspective, documenting the city’s multicultural vernacular through all five senses.

As well as delivering workshops, creating commercial work and making other personal work, the side project Maram and Hana took us through embodies all aspects of Archief Cairo’s practice: history, design, language and culture. It involves restoring the only letterpress in the world that houses hieroglyphic characters, housed at the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology. A small room built in 1907, everything inside the room was once part of the printing press. It’s the best orientalist printing house in the world, and Archief Cairo’s mission is as much about researching the artefacts and processes as it is about restoring it to its former quality.

Maram took us through the letterpress characters and the Egyptologist who designed over 7,500 hieroglyphics that are part of the system. Bearing an authentic similarity to the contents and columns of ancient temples, Maram and Hana showed us drawer upon drawer of characters, which are valued by Egyptologists worldwide. Explaining how one would use the machines to write in the written language, Hana went on to say how one book took seven years to make using the letterpress.

Providing a tour of the room, the various processes that go into working the press (including a monotype one) and some history of the presses to boot, the comprehensive talk ended with Maram and Hana answering some questions from the audience. These questions delved into why the two felt the need to start Archief Cairo in the first place, how long it’s taken to conduct this research and master some of the processes, and importantly, when the work will resume when it’s safe to do so once more.

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Archief Cairo: Searching for Guru, 2018 (Copyright © Archief Cairo)

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Archief Cairo at Nicer Tuesdays

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Archief Cairo: Collection of Plastic Bags together with Sabah Elhadid and Yara Ahmed, 2018 (Copyright © Archief Cairo)

How an illustrator turned to cheffing over lockdown

We’ve long been fans of Kate Prior and over the years have covered a lot of the illustrator’s work, from a commission for Wired Japan visualising air to a depiction of sexuality over lockdown. But this week Kate dialled in to May’s Nicer Tuesdays to tell us about a very specific project, which began last year. When lockdown put a pause on our day-to-day lives, Kate and her partner Ugo found themselves in a new area (having recently moved) but with no way of getting to know their neighbours. So, to keep themselves occupied and to meet people on their street, they decided to start their own pizza business. They bought a pizza oven, raised over £1,000 for the local food bank and on Tuesday evening, Kate told us all about Short Road Pizza – now a regular pop-up in Leyton in east London.

Talking us through the ins and outs of this project – and the illustrations which accompany the project – first off we rewound and went back to Kate’s beginnings in the industry. She explained: “My freelance career was actually a side hustle.” Freelancing on the side while working in-house in Urban Outfitter’s art department, the side project soon became her main line of work. Fast-forward to the lockdown, like many creatives, for Kate work seemed to dry up, but with the pizza business, there was plenty to be done.

When it came to the branding of Short Road Pizza, Kate had the dream task upon her. “It was very like, go crazy with it and what you want,” she says. Working with Ugo (who made a deck outlining the art direction for the project) Kate talked us through her design decisions and characterful choices, along with the theme that runs alongside the project – the theme, obviously, being food. As well as being a fun and rewarding project, Short Road Pizza also taught her a lot about her own creativity more broadly. “You use very different parts of your brain,” she said. “I don’t boss anyone around when I do my illustration work but when we do Short Road Pizza, I turn into bossy mode.”

It has also presented a much more physical challenge, doing something far more active like cheffing which took her mind off lingering worries. This, in turn, has changed the way Kate approaches creative briefs, introducing a more physical aspect to her creativity. And for anyone thinking about taking a leap into their own side project, Kate ended her talk with some words of wisdom: “Just give it a go. I’m scared of things going wrong or not going well, but this has been a lesson in the opposite.”

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Kate Prior: Short Road Pizza (Copyright © Kate Prior, 2020)

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Kate Prior at May's Nicer Tuesdays

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Kate Prior: Short Road Pizza (Copyright © Kate Prior, 2020)

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Kate Prior: Short Road Pizza (Copyright © Kate Prior, 2020)

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Kate Prior: Short Road Pizza (Copyright © Kate Prior, 2020)

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Kate Prior: Short Road Pizza (Copyright © Kate Prior, 2020)

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Kate Prior: Short Road Pizza (Copyright © Kate Prior, 2020)

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Left: Archief Cairo: Searching for Guru, 2018 (Copyright © Archief Cairo)

Right: Kate Prior: Short Road Pizza (Copyright © Kate Prior, 2020)

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Further Info

Nicer Tuesdays Online is our monthly event of creative talks. You can find out more here.

Did you know that if you join Extra Nice, It’s Nice That’s new membership programme, you’ll automatically receive a ticket every month for Nicer Tuesdays Online, for the entire year? That’s just one of the many perks that makes Extra Nice so special. To find out more about this and all the other benefits of joining Extra Nice, head over to the dedicated part of our site.

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