Welcome to the blog of Johannesburg creative agency Nicework. A fine selection of the best creative ideas, art, design and advertising.
Penguin commissioned Angus Hyland and his team to design a new series of five of Virginia Woolf’s major works. The design references authentic period elements, as well as more contemporary book styles. The dust jackets feature abstract compositions in the spirit of the textile designs of the Omega Workshop. The Workshop was founded by members of the Bloomsbury Group who included Woolf herself, her sister Vanessa Bell, and Duncan Grant.
Hipster-inspired filler text for your website or design project. A great play on the Lorem Ipsum that designers traditionally use.
The latest NICE Magazine is out and available for download! Expect the usual dose of top-notch design, art, publishing and illustration from the world’s finest creatives.
Follow these instructions to get your hands on one, it’s cool and free!
The fourth issue of NICE magazine is all about colour.
So what do we have on offer for this issue? We profile illustrator Grady McFerrin who gave us some really useful insights on being a successful illustrator. Infographic wizards: Tien-Min Liao and Peter Ørntoft will make you look at data visualisation in an entirely different way. French design studio Zim & Zou let us showcase their colourful paper installation, which is the coolest thing we have seen in a long time. The bold paintings of Guim Tió Zarraluki throws a critical eye on the concepts of beauty and glamour, while the body art of Amanda Wachob, blurs the boundary between fine art and body art.
For those design-orientated individuals, the work of creative duo Craig & Karl and the diverse portfolio of Christopher Bettig is sure to hit the spot. Get your industrial design and furniture fix from our features on Hekseskudd and the UM Project. Our feature on the new IKEA baking book “Homemade is Best” is sure to get you baking up a storm in no time. We also have some great features on illustrator Blake Suarez and artists Ana Montiel and Marco Ugolini.
For our regular “Ten Things” feature we asked each of our four contributors to select a colour and create a collection of meaningful things around it. They came up with some phenomenal colour collections. Also expect some colourful examples of great advertising and packaging design.
Renowned designers Steven Heller and Louise Fili have recently co-authored and published a book titled “Scripts: Elegant Lettering from Design’s Golden Age”. The book focuses on various examples of typography advertising, street signs, invitations, type-specimen books, personal letters from the 19th and 20th Century.
“Scripts is a celebration of script letters, alphabets and fonts from classical to modern, from Italy, France, Germany, England and the United States. It is a collection of all manner of ephemera in which scripts play a prominent role.”
- Steven Heller (taken from an interview on the Thames & Hudson blog)
We are proud to announce the launch of our brand spanking new website! It’s full of awesome eye candy and helpful information. Make sure you take a look around. We’d love to hear your feedback.
We’d also like to take this opportunity to bid adieu to our old website. Thanks old buddy. You served us well. But we are moving onto bigger and better things.
Another brand spanking new edition of NICE Magazine is available for you to download!
Follow these instructions to get your hands on one, it’s cool and free!
We have chosen “Tactile” as our theme for this issue. All our content has been carefully curated to showcase creative work that displays a focused eye for pattern, texture and material.
This issue, we pick the brain of book cover designer Coralie Bickford-Smith, who is a consummate artist of the printed medium. We bring you a trio of brilliant illustrators: Alberto Cerriteño, Mieke van der Merwe and Anna Emilia Laitinen. The crafty creations of MaricorMaricar and the ceramic work of Renée Rossouw is truly exceptional and well worth a look. For those design-orientated individuals, the work of creative studio Serial Cut and local designer Daniel Ting Chong is sure to hit the spot. Get your furniture fix from our article on Finnish furniture designer Sami Kallio. Our feature on Suzaan Heyns bumps up the sartorial content, with a beautifully shot campaign by Brett Rubin for her latest collection “Die Vorm”.
Our regular “Ten Things” feature is a bumper edition this issue. We profile five cool and creative people and the things that inspire them. Also expect some tactile examples of great advertising and packaging design.
While you are at it, you can:
Penguin has just released their Great Food Series, which is a collection of twenty books that document the finest food writing from the last 400 years. Each book cover is designed by the talented Coralie Bickford-Smith and inspired by ceramic styles from the time period the book was originally published. A great concept and great design.
The second issue of NICE magazine is available now for download!
Thanks to your overwhelmingly positive response we were able to generate another awesome issue of interesting creative work for you to feast your eyes on.
Follow these instructions to get your own FREE magazine:
This issue we focused on places and spaces, which has been interpreted both literally and abstractly throughout the magazines pages. Look out for our profile on typographer and creative heavyweight Jessica Hische. We’ve also showcased the impressive illustrations of Sam Caldwell and Paul X Johnson. Industrial designer Tomas Kral showed us his unique design objects and Studio on Fire wowed us with their flawless letterpress design. For those architecturally minded individuals, we have featured GASS Architecture Design Studio and for the gadget nerds, we’ve created a list of ten must-have iPad applications. We’ve also included some regulars, like our print advertising round up and Ten Things feature. Lastly, we’ve provided you with some city guides for Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town. It’s jam packed with eye candy. Prepare yourselves.
While you are at it, you can:
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A big thank you to everyone involved. High fives all round.
So, we do lots of websites. The story is usually the same: discovery, content strat and generation, prototyping and design, code, launch. There are, of course, many other things that might need to be done: usability testing, complex interaction design, technology, etc…
When we started doing this we thought very differently about what the ciritcal elements in the make up of a great website are. Over the years though, we have come to the conclusion that it all comes down to content. Good information. The design can be very mediocre, the code messy, the navigation adequate but bad content = ultimate fail.
So, to that end we modified our approach to be content centric and thanks to clever people like Catherine Green, we are doing better sites.
If you are interested in this kind of thing, check out Jakob Neilsen. He is an old school usability guru. Im always amazed by the quality and simplicity of his writing (always backed by mind numbing volumes of data). Check out this article on how users read your website!
The highlights:
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