Review of the Year 2018: Top 25 Features

In 1992, the year of Pentagram’s 20th anniversary, founding partner Colin Forbes wrote a piece detailing the design firm’s purposefully unique structure. The piece noted how it’s common for design firms to have one or two partners at its helm, but Pentagram presented a way of doing things differently. The founders purposefully set themselves the biggest challenge: “to run what we believe is an excellent design-driven firm into a second generation,” Forbes wrote.

A. Savage is an artist who is always walking the ledge between two creative worlds. The first is a musical one, where he throttles through songs playing in Parquet Courts. But the second is a slower paced painting career, where his enviable talent for building a narrative shifts from songwriting onto canvas. While he has no plans to settle in either camp permanently, his painting studio is “wonderful” the artist tells It’s Nice That. “It’s my favourite place in the world.”

When 2001: A Space Odyssey premiered on 10 May 1968 – 50 years ago today – it somehow captured the imagination of its viewers: an audience who was yet to experience footage of the moon landing over a year later. Packed full of lengthy sequences and free from dialogue or even sound, its imagery, directed by Stanley Kubrick, is tranquil to the point of being static at times. This combined with its understandably puzzling ending meant the film received mixed reviews from critics upon its release. Despite this, it quickly garnered a ferocious cult following and became the highest grossing film of that year: the only Kubrick motion picture to hold this status.

From Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings illustrating his internal rage to Adele’s breakup album 21, time and again people connect with work that reveals something about an artist’s soul. But most of us spend our lives trying to avoid being this exposed, thanks to a pervasive belief that vulnerability equals weakness. According to research professor and author Brené Brown, fear of shame inhibits creativity, keeping us hiding in case we are not worthy or good enough. Through four books, including the number one New York Times bestseller Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, and one of the top five most-watched TED talks on YouTube, the University of Houston professor has helped millions be more open about their vulnerability. To find out more about the role vulnerability plays in the creative process and how we can face our fears of being fully seen, we take a closer look at Brené’s research and speak to a variety of daringly vulnerable artists.

In the summer of 1951, TV personality Art Linkletter took a trip to Copenhagen with Walt Disney. Walking around the Tivoli Gardens amusement park, he spots Walt, writing. “I asked him what he was doing, and he replied, ‘I’m just making notes about something that I’ve always dreamed of – a great, great playground…’”

For Ben Parker and Paul Austin, the founders of London-based design agency Made Thought, a brand should consider its identity as the “current coat you’re putting on”. In turn, Made Thought’s process of creating an identity is akin to designing a tailored winter coat.

Keith Haring’s life, and New York’s Downtown Scene, and perhaps culture as a whole changed in 1980 when Andy Warhol and the art dealer Tony Shafrazi strolled into the basement of Club 57, which neither had ever stepped foot into before, and which Haring had filled with hundreds of drawings in gold and silver magic marker. It was the night of his opening. “We were all buzzing,” recalls Kim Hastreiter, who would soon afterwards found Paper magazine, “‘UH OH,’ ‘What are THEY doing here?’ We were suspicious and in a sense excited and sad at the same time – because that night it felt like our amazing secret world Downtown was being invaded and discovered and wouldn’t be the same again.” In many ways she was right. But first of all, Haring would be catapulted into the limelight.Warhol invited him to his Factory for lunch and they soon became good friends; Haring kept Warhol up to date with 80s youth culture, and Warhol in turn introduced him to the glittering world of celebrity and success. In 1982, Haring had his breakthrough solo show at Tony Shafrazi’s illustrious gallery on Mercer Street. The following year, he collaborated with Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren on their autumn/winter 1983 Witches collection, and Madonna wearing a leather jacket he hand-painted to perform Like a Virgin on Top of the Pops. In 1985, he drew graffiti all over Grace Jones’ naked body for her live shows at Paradise Garage. He was at the heart of both modern art and pop culture, which is exactly where he wanted to be. Had he not passed away of AIDS-related complications in 1990, aged 31, Keith Haring would be celebrating his 60th birthday today – which makes this a good moment to consider his life and his legacy.“I arrived in New York at a time when the most beautiful paintings being shown in the city were on wheels, on trains,” he once said, remembering coming to the city in 1978, “paintings that travelled to you instead of vice versa.” But rather than copying the Wild Style graffiti artists, Haring found a different way of working underground. Noticing one day that unsold advertising spaces on the New York City subway were filled with plain black paper, he ran up the stairs to Times Square, bought some white chalk, ran back underground and began drawing in his trademark language of comic figures and squiggles. Before long, he had made thousands of drawings – up to 40 a day – as he rode the subways across the five boroughs, to and from school, work, clubs, parties and cruising spots. His works would be seen by a colossal number of people every day, and because they were so often replaced, he had to keep coming up with fresh new ideas continually.Haring loved the subway, with all its advertising posters, painted trains and flows of people, and also loved the secret Downtown, the hidden world of metropolitan fucking and clubbing. He loved dancing the night away at now legendary dives like Club 57, Paradise Garage and the Mudd Club, or cruising public bathhouses, or the backrooms of S/M orgy clubs like the Anvil, for the kind of sex that wasn’t so readily available back home in rural Pennsylvania. “He suddenly popped out like a flower, like a seed in that cauldron of energy: New York City,” Timothy Leary once said about Haring, “and he put all his remarkable energy together – the wall, the easel, the canvas, the pigment… it’s a dance!” The city’s nightlife, with all its joie de vivre, its shuddering, intertwined bodies and explosions of colour, was where he found his inspiration but also, in those hardcore early years, before the dangers of AIDs became so well known, and before he became such a prominent advocate of safe sex, that Haring contracted the HIV that would eventually lead to his death. In a classical tragic trajectory, New York is what made Keith Haring and also what killed him, all in the space of just over a decade.His deep love for nightclubs, and for black and Latino culture, and everything around them, was also a huge inspiration for Haring. In that sense, his legacy can be seen in the practices of younger artists like Eddie Peake: who makes bright, graffiti-inspired work, and takes much of his inspiration from gay culture, black culture, club culture and pirate radio culture, and who strips his performers naked and covers them in paint, like Haring and Grace Jones. But of course he’s just one of many artists continuing Haring’s legacy in their own way.

A few years ago the name Luke Evans was on everyone’s lips. Creating a body of work which walked back and forth between fine art and photography, everyone wanted to know “just how!?” he made the work he did.

Young Americans by Sharif Hamza, a British photographer living in New York, documents an array of American teenagers who practice firing guns for sport. It’s a series that is equally eye-opening and difficult to look at and, in turn, it divides opinion. “Every step of the way,” he tells It’s Nice That, “there has been an internal conflict.”

At Eike König’s After School Club, there’s everything a design student could ever need. Want to print an A2 artwork of something you’re working on? You can do it and it’s free. Need advice on what typeface is best for something? One of the world’s best designers is sitting over there. In need of a cold coffee to combat the summer heat and your hangover? The cafe serves it with ice or ice cream.

On 12 June 1997, the Isle of Eigg Heritage Trust took control of the Isle of Eigg: one of the Small Isles, in the Scottish Inner Hebrides, seven miles off the west coast of Scotland. Under the previous landlord system, the Islanders suffered poor housing conditions, unemployment and a lack of adequate infrastructure. However, after its successful community buyout, structures were set up to make sure that the Islanders would always have an opportunity to be involved in decisions that affected their community and this year (2018) will mark the centenary of Eigg becoming completely self-sufficient and off the grid via three forms of renewable energy.

There are many ways I could begin to explain the life and work of Corita Kent, from an artist and educator to a nun and social activist. But what describes her best and most valuably, is the way that people who knew her tend to: “An A+ person,” for instance, and the fact "she saw possibilities in you you didn’t know about yet”. Or simply in their description of her kind attention, because “when she talked to you she made you feel like you were the only person there”.

Illustration is an incredible skill. It’s the first creative discipline introduced to toddlers and it’s an art form many adults envy. It can make you weep with laughter or provoke deep thoughts. Illustrators quite literally bring to life what words or photographs can’t describe.

Sound, experience and installation designer Yuri Suzuki is set to join Pentagram’s London office as a new partner. The announcement today comes just weeks after it was revealed that Astrid Stavro, the founder of design studio Atlas, was to become the third designer this year to join the partnership. Clearly, Pentagram is in a hurry to bring new blood on-board in order to help shape the future of the world’s largest independently-owned design studio.

Designer Tracy Ma’s creative career, and life really, has followed an ongoing process of reinvention. It’s an approach those familiar with her work will be able to spot, because she doesn’t tackle the job of a designer – whatever that really means – like any of the caricatures who increasingly populate the industry. It’s Tracy’s wit which allows her to see the often earnest attitude to graphic design as one big joke, even if no one else gets the punchline.

One of the designer’s first jobs was at Bloomberg Businessweek, where a three-month stint became a five-year job. Between 2011–2016 Tracy worked her way up to deputy creative director, ultimately working on over 200 issues. Throughout her time at the publication her visual output chopped and changed in style, but the sense of humour was consistent; she’s perpetually contextually clever with content. When provided with visuals that were “often scarce or shitty,” she’d utilise the potential of typography as an image. In her current position as visual editor at The New York Times’ style desk, Tracy continues an approach to editorial which puts the reader’s engagement first. In the run-up to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s big day, her first Times piece saw her design an extensive – and comical – FAQ of “everything you wanted to know” about the royal wedding. Question 27 asks “Would it be at all possible to surf this website without such cutting-edge art direction?”. The answer it displays? No. Obviously.