Moscow-based Pavel Mishkin got into illustration after an unexpected epiphany: “After visiting Nepal I had bad mountain sickness and poisoning – when I returned home I realised I wanted to draw,” he says. Since then Pavel’s been working hard on developing his style, which he says is constantly changing in a bid to improve it.
Halloween brought us so many horrors on Tuesday that we’ve gone and scared ourselves into next month. Yes, November is here, and with it brings colder weather, Christmas countdowns and the relentless planning of festive catch-ups, drinks, shindigs and soirees.
Earlier this year a survey in Sweden showed that the time people most needed support at work was when they were experiencing sorrow, going through a divorce or the loss of a relative. To reassure individuals going through this experience, The Church of Sweden has provided 2,000 companies with a First Aid Kit for Sorrow, a pack of illustrated tips, drawn by Swedish illustrator Stina Löfgren, created in time for All Saints Day 2017.
“As a filmmaker I have always loved stories and colour slides feel like a frame cut out of a longer narrative,” explains founder of The Anonymous Project, Lee Shulman. Originally from the UK but now based in Paris, Lee’s obsession with photographic slides led him to begin the project in January of this year as a means of collecting and protecting stranger’s Kodacrome-colour slides from flea markets and personal collections. Alongside freelance book-editor Emmanuelle Halkin, Lee has amassed a collection of nearly 400,000 slides since the project’s inception.
This week’s Friday Mixtape comes from Montreal duo, Blue Hawaii. Made up of Raphaelle “Ra” Standell and Alex “Agor” Kerby, the pair released their second record, Tenderness earlier this month on Arbutus Records.
Canadian collage artist and filmmaker Winston Hacking has directed, puppeteered and animated Flying Lotus’ latest video Post Requisite, the musician’s first music video in two years.
Studio Output recently conducted an experimental research study into the effects of social media on mental health, through a creative lens, to further understand the issues and explore possible design solutions. It was based on four questions: what if social platforms were designed to consider their effect on mental health? What if they took more responsibility for their users’ mental wellbeing? Could we track our mental health the way we do physical health? And should we count digital content “calories” like nutritional calories? Here, Output’s David McDougall reflects on the findings.
From Quentin Blake’s black watercolour pencil to the primitive red pencil David Bailey relies upon, the stories behind great creatives’ tools are an intimate insight to their process. Tapping into the subject in detail is designer Alex Hammond and photographer Mike Tinney, with their long-running online and exhibition series The Secret Life of the Pencil, which is now being published as a book by Laurence King. It features interviews with a list of renowned creative people, from Nadav Kander and John Pawson to Paul Smith, Sophie Conran and Michèle Burke, and portraits of the pencils of 70 others such as Tracey Emin, Tom Dixon and Philippe Starck.
“We got the idea of the arrow when checking out diagrams of magnetic field behaviour,” explains József Gergely Kiss of Classmate Studio who recently designed the identity for candidate European Cultural Capital 2023, Debrecen. The identity focusses on the city’s ability to gather people of all nationalities and backgrounds, using the arrow as a visual motif.
Photographer Younès Klouche’s series Orphée documents the same locations as those presented in the landmark exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape shown at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York in 1975. The show epitomised a key moment in American landscape photography with many photographers soon emulating the spirit and aesthetics of the exhibition. Featured were young and emerging talents at the time including Robert Adams, Bernd and Hilla Becher and Frank Gohlke. Inspired by the stripped-back, no-frills aesthetic present in the show, Younès’ sees his own work as an essay on the “evolution of documentary photography and the current conceptual-reflexive turn that it is taking”.
Primarily a painter, Flo Brook’s work spans collage, drawing and sculpture. Through this myriad of mediums, Flo represents numerous thoughts, experiences and themes that are autobiographical but also open to all. “Broadly speaking they’re about family (whether blood, chosen, queer) community (or the absence of) and ‘growing up’, a sort of queer coming-of-age story,” the artist tells It’s Nice That.
Graphic designer David Wise has always been involved in the creative world. He studied a bachelor’s in Fine Arts in Painting and Digital Media but it wasn’t until the summer before his senior year that he was formally introduced to graphic design. “I became instantly fascinated with the sort of divergent, but complimentary history design has with other disciplines like architecture and fine art,” David tells It’s Nice That. He went on to spend the rest of his senior year “getting up to speed,” taking as many tangentially related courses as he could. This helped him develop a portfolio that eventually led him to Cranbrook Academy of Art where he received his master’s in Fine Arts.
The Wines of Gala is Salvador Dalí’s take on the “pleasures of the grape” and sets out to organise wines “according to the sensations they create in our very depths”. Published by Taschen, the reprinted book is a follow-up to the best-selling Les Dîners de Gala, which was a gastronomic romp through the feasts he used to prepare during the 70s.
What are we talking about when we talk about inspiration? I don’t think we know any more. Inspiration has become too abstract, too easy, too woolly. In becoming a catch-all term to mean everything, it has stopped meaning anything.
October’s Nicer Tuesdays covered a national rebrand, a vital platform for combatting sexual harassment, witchcraft publishing and stop-motion, singing cakes. Detailed, poignant, inventive and hilarious, the evening’s talks at Oval Space showed the potential of creativity to both change the world and cause apparent “mass hysteria”. Here’s a few highlights, and things we learned at last night’s event.h3. Wales is so much more than its cliches
Architecture in Stuttgart is a pretty big deal. “There are more architectural firms in the city and its surrounding areas than they are architects in France,” graphic designers Steffen Knöll and Antonia Terhedebrügge tell It’s Nice That. It was for this reason that, when they were approached to design the cultural identity for an architecture festival whilst still studying at the State Academy of Art and Design Stuttgart, they knew they couldn’t say no.
As the winter sets in and outside seems increasingly unappealing, it’s prime time to take in one of the plethora of great exhibitions opening in November. From Russian protest art to Africa’s rising stars, our hand-picked selection features five UK-based shows and five international.h3. Gilbert & George: The Beard Pictures and their Fuckosophy
22 November 2017 – 28 January 2018
White Cube Bermondsey, London, UK
Looking on Craigslist or Ebay always unearths some hidden gems. Hopefully, these are gems you were actually looking for, but for Eric Oglander his hunt for second-hand goods unearthed an ongoing project that he’s been working on for the last four years, documenting hilariously odd images of people photographing mirrors to sell.
Tessa Chong and Lee Arkapaw have animated a story of survival during apartheid in South Africa, as told by pianist and composer Abdullah Ibrahim. The short has been created for NPR’s Jazz Night in America and sees Tessa and Lee animate Abdullah’s captivating narration by visualising the historical context and characters within the story.
A few weeks back, It’s Nice That wrapped up warm, jumped on a train and headed north to colder climes at Newcastle-Gateshead, where we joined with Google Design for the latest instalment in their SPAN conference series. For those that don’t know, SPAN is an annual conference about design and technology hosted by Google across a trio of cities. This year’s SPAN had Google Design travelling to Pittsburgh in September, to Mexico City in November, and, for October, somewhere slightly nearer to home — for the It’s Nice That team at least — Newcastle-Gateshead.
While studying fine art at university, Taipei-based illustrator ViviChen often searched the school library to broaden her bank of references beyond the traditional paintings and artworks she was being shown in class. As a result she discovered books and magazines full of illustrators and images from all over the world, which now play into her work.