-
Jan 13, 2025 | 
itsnicethat.com | Liz Gorny |Ellis Tree
Forward Thinking 2025 is a manifesto for bringing humanity into all you do as a creative person. In this piece, It’s Nice That’s own Liz Gorny and Ellis Tree pick out the anti-trends, and who’s doing them best. The most talked-about piece of graphic design of the year, if there was such an award, would surely go to Brat; that potent combination of Dinamo’s ROM typeface and acid green.
-
Dec 3, 2024 | 
itsnicethat.com | Liz Gorny
Graphic design can be romantic. One concept that never fails to tug at my heartstrings is that of the besotted collector. The obsessive kind: someone whose “thing” is 20th-century toiletry labels. Better yet, sheets of toilet paper themselves. And I’m actually not kidding about that last one.
-
Oct 4, 2024 | 
itsnicethat.com | Liz Gorny
In May 2022, Michele Rosenthal, a vector illustrator and “Corporate Memphis apologist”, started a thread on X. It read: “Why You Should Be Hiring Full-Time Illustrators to your Specialised Design Teams”. Michele laid out several compelling arguments, including the fact that illustrated assets have become an “afterthought” in the brand identity, negatively impacting the quality of mascots, icons, and the like.
-
Sep 11, 2024 | 
itsnicethat.com | Liz Gorny
The Worlds Illustration Awards, which showcases the best in show across fields like editorial, animation and advertising, has unveiled its 2024 winners. One of the category winners – New Talent Advertising – is Atlanta-based Zhang Jiayi, who was recognised for an entirely uncommissioned project made for his hometown pastry shop, Master Bao’s.
-
Sep 4, 2024 | 
itsnicethat.com | Liz Gorny
In May, word spread that an “AI-infused platform” would accept a flat fee of $5,000 in return for 20 brand names, delivered to you in five days. Monika – that’s the name of the platform; unclear whether the bot helped name itself – guarantees 20 trademark-ready names of high creative calibre. “It’s one of the hardest parts of the branding process,” Monika co-founder Mark Liney wrote on X to announce the launch of the service. “Few agencies do it well.
-
Aug 7, 2024 | 
itsnicethat.com | Liz Gorny
Cinema is in trouble. Or, at least, that’s been the story for many moons now. It generally goes as follows: after a painful struggle to get audiences to return after the pandemic, viewership remains unpredictable. Phenomena like Barbienheimer and Taylor Swift’s Era Tour might have helped the picture immensely – both events turned going to the cinema into an essential part of watching a movie – but as of January and February 2024, we were still not quite back to pre-pandemic box office levels.
-
Jul 9, 2024 | 
itsnicethat.com | Liz Gorny
After just three years of running Config, its annual design conference, Figma expected an audience of over 10,000 in-person attendees this June, up from 8,500 last year – and this time, there was breakdancing. Attendees audibly counted down the one-minute open film each day and, inside the Moscone Center in San Francisco, there was a huge amount of enthusiasm for both the Config branding and the newly launched features in the collaborative design tool.
-
Jul 2, 2024 | 
itsnicethat.com | Liz Gorny
Motion blur, spiked typography and vests – we analyse key art for action movies of the past, and investigate whether they’ve changed, with a so-called masculinity crisis upon us. Last summer, there was a war between ‘guys’ and ‘girls’. Barbenheimer meant a clash between pink and red spread across cinemas and over a thousand memes which said “this is what girls like,” and “this is what boys like,” and they weren’t far wrong.
-
Jun 23, 2024 | 
itsnicethat.com | Liz Gorny
Outside of their design work, they work with colour markers, charcoal and oil paint in their art practice. In these works, Ming uses: “vivid colours [to] convey the intense emotions of living with severe eczema and East-Asian queerness,” they say. Their paintings and drawings often combine elements of graphic design, showing how the two practices overlap for Ming – it’s perhaps no surprise that graphic-driven names like Bruce Nauman, Elizabeth Murray and Bráulio Amado are major influences.
-
Jun 23, 2024 | 
itsnicethat.com | Liz Gorny
Shira Inbar and Julia Dufossé have been learning a lot about carpets recently. Not just any carpets, Electra-Dye carpets; a type of wacky flooring, usually covered in swirls or planets, that populated movie theatres and multiplexes of the 1990s and early 2000s. “One of the things that really cracked me up is learning that these patterns were designed to camouflage spilled drinks, popcorn kernels, cookie crumbs and general movie theater grime,” says Shira.
