The Nice Hour: Visualising Music with Aries Moross

Welcome to The Nice Hour, a series of advice-led events from It’s Nice That on Adobe Live, offering you the chance to receive some creative guidance from the industry’s leading practitioners.

Over the next few weeks (on the 3, 10 and 17 August) we invite you to join us for a discussion of creative work over on Adobe Live. An online community of creative practitioners, Adobe Live holds sessions each weekday sharing ideas and topics across illustration, graphic design, motion design and photography. Not just helpful for practical advice within these disciplines, the sessions are full of conversation and live chats between audience members and hosts.

Each Monday at 12pm (BST) It’s Nice That will be sitting down with a creative heavyweight from a specific discipline to go through portfolios, offering advice on the specific work at hand but also on the industry as a whole. Our first creative career advisor will be polymath practitioner Aries Moross.

Across huge client names, Aries’ studio – Studio Moross – has routinely worked with some of the greatest music-leaning design clients to date. They founded a record label while they were at university and have worked with the festival Park Life, MTV and the almighty Spice Girls, to name just a few. That being said, Studio Moross’ work is a brilliant example of designing for music with bags of personality.

Creating a visual accompaniment to music is an area we constantly hear creatives are keen to tap into. In this Nice Hour session Aries and the It’s Nice That team are looking for submissions made in response to music – maybe a record sleeve design or poster, for instance. Once the group of portfolios is chosen, Aries will share wisdom on how to create a visual output to best match a musical one. During the live session It’s Nice That will also be leading conversations with audience members in a parallel online chat and asking questions posed by viewers too.

Aside from the theme at hand, Ries is looking forward to seeing the work creatives have been making more recently, personally interested to see “what design and illustration looks like in 2020” and “what people have been up to during this time”, they tell us. If you’re thinking of submitting your work for this event but are unsure where to start or sitting on the fence, Aries also has five top tips for presenting work:

1. Best projects at the start!
2. Edit! Not too many images per project, just enough to communicate your idea and the work made.
3. Not too much writing! Simple captions or titles are great.
4. Get someone to check it for you, for spelling, order, cohesion, etc.
5. Present your images clearly, not too much per page.

Whether you’re planning to submit work or not, be sure to tune in to Aries’ session on Monday 3 August (12pm BST) to join a wider conversation about successful creative work. You can also already connect with other members of the creative community on Adobe Live each weekday at 12pm, including further events with guest artists.

To submit your portfolio to be discussed in the session, please upload a PDF of your work and your contact details by following the link just below. Please ensure your uploaded portfolio is a downloadable PDF up to 10 MB, or you can alternatively share a website link. We will not be able to open WeTransfer links, Hightail or Dropbox folders. If you are keen for a particular project in your portfolio to be discussed, please make a note of this in your application. We look forward to hearing from you and to seeing your work! Please note applications close 26 July at midnight (BST).