Björk and Jesse Kanda's creative partnership explored in WeTransfer's documentary series, Work in Progress

Iggy Ldn is a progressive, forward-thinking artist. His earlier films Fatherhood and Black Boys Don’t Cry challenged preconceptions of masculinity in the hope to combat pervasive black male stereotypes. But for his third venture, Silk, Iggy looked back to the jazz era for inspiration. “I think of it as a time where people weren’t so aware of themselves; their appearance and behaviours were less calculated and they were more natural in their self-expression,” Iggy tells It’s Nice That. His latest film is an unapologetic reminder to appreciate the present moment during a time of Instagram likes and Snapchat stories. It captures a young black man dressed in various impeccable outfits against a backdrop of draping, white silk and is accompanied by a series of striking photographs

“I’m really interested in the possibility film and video theory could bring to a graphic design practice by translating and bridging both mediums together,” explains French artist and graphic designer, Kévin Bray. Currently based in Amsterdam where he is undertaking a residency at Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Kévin’s work is a hybrid of techniques, sitting somewhere between film, graphic design and sound design.

Director Fred Rowson has returned with the latest in a series of unnerving short films inspired by the bizarre and banal characters of South London. Rodney stars a retiree with macabre hobby –he has a pet cemetery in his back garden. So far, so innocent (although a bit strange) until the film’s chirpy narrator tells us about his wife Beatrice, who has left him, perhaps under more gruesome circumstances than Rodney is letting on.

Born and raised in Barcelona in an Italian family, cinematographer and graphic designer Pablo Di Prima grew up feeling like an outsider, not least because of his mop of red hair. “I think this shaped the way I experienced and grew up in my hometown where I was taking part of life as an observer,” Pablo tells It’s Nice That. “Maybe like a film director looking through the lens.” When Pablo moved to London to study at Central St Martins, his “foreigner” status was flipped on its head: through it, he fitted in.

We’ve been tracing the trail of London-based filmmaker and artist Bafic for quite some time. He’s been making short films since 2009, and among his more recent work you’ll spot a music video for Neneh Cherry Spit Three Times, as well as one for her daughter Mabel’s My Boy My Town, among commercial work for the likes of NikeLab and TfL, Lily Allen and ASOS.

In October 2015, brothers Luke Powell and Jody Hudson-Powell became the twentieth and twenty-first partners of design studio, Pentagram. Three years later, they continue to work with an ever-impressive list of clients from the British Fashion Council to London’s Garden Museum. Prior to joining Pentagram, the pair operated under Hudson-Powell: a practice which merged their interests in graphic design and technology resulting in a varied output across print and digital platforms.

Playing Reija Meriläinen’s eerie computer game Survivor feels something like being in a bad dream. Starting off in a claustrophobic, fleshy cave, where an over-enthusiastic voiceover explains the rules, there’s a sense of foreboding that you can’t quite put your finger on. It doesn’t help that the sound design is a mix between Twin Peaks-y lullaby and animalistic foley work. The doors seem to growl open rather than creek.

“I don’t believe that your personal and your commercial work should be two completely different things,” states London-based photographer Giovanni Corabi. Originally from Italy, this belief is evident throughout Giovanni’s portfolio: a quick flick through will leave you at a loss for where one type of project ends and the other begins, the two seamlessly flowing and informing each other.

Contrary to its distinctly present-day focus, the Design Museum’s latest exhibition, Hope to Nope: Graphics and Politics 2008-18, started off as a historical retrospective. Curator Margaret Cubbage and designer of the show, GraphicDesign&’s Lucienne Roberts, discussed beginning in the 50s and 60s, but then Brexit happened. Then Trump. And what was immediately evident was the seismic creative response to global crises. “We suddenly felt there was an urgency to respond to this,” Margaret tells It’s Nice That. “How pivotal graphic design had become to political movements, and how diverse and rich and democratic it was.”

Yutaka Satoh’s posters are the perfect crossover between art and design. With their satisfying colour palettes and considered arrangements of unusual shapes, Yutaka’s creations could just as easily hang on the walls of a gallery as they could advertise upcoming events. The Tokyo-based artist commonly produces posters for exhibitions, concerts and shows alongside his long list of accomplished personal projects. Yet his distinct aesthetics never falter whether he is designing a commissioned piece of work or a stand-alone project; a testament to Yutaka’s loyalty to his craft.

Without ornamentation to distract or a flashy colour palette to hide behind, it’s hard to make a simple drawing really, really good. But it’s something Vancouver-based illustrator Hiller Goodspeed has totally nailed. His odd, humorous pencil drawings are filled with characters that make us chuckle. Whether hiding in their “safety tube” or celebrating being second place, it’s hard not to be endeared by these funny little fellows.

Like many, Hanka van der Voet spent her teenage years hoarding issues of magazines such as The Face, Dutch and i-D, using this material to inspire her own zines. “It seems a bit unavoidable that I was going to set up my own fashion magazine someday,” the Amsterdam-based creative tells It’s Nice That. Currently the head of MA Fashion Strategy at ArtEZ University programme, Hanka recently launched her “inevitable” fashion magazine, alongside graphic designer Beau Bertens.

Designer Karl Toomey’s AI assistant Alice may be the worst PA in history. Karl’s latest artwork is his new website, which follows Alice’s stream of consciousness through a robotic voiceover and a string of subtitles on a yellow backdrop. Within the first two minutes of meeting her, she not only discloses Karl’s – no doubt – illegal plans to help facilitate burglary but also his violent tendencies that have been made possible by goose fat and pliers in the past.

No matter the content of a project graphic designer Aurelia Peter is working on, she starts the process by asking questions. “Which message should be conveyed?” she says, or “What kind of association should be triggered in the viewer?” To answer these creative queries Aurelia begins with a manual approach, sketches which enable “new design approaches” and explain a lot about her approach to typography.

If you’ve never had the desire to disappear into the background then you’re either a very confident person or a verbally continent one. But for those of us wallflowers with our feet permanently in our mouths, photographer Brooke DiDonato’s As Usual series will have a particular resonance. Mixing the everyday with a touch of the fantastical, Brooke’s photographs capture surreal moments when people are obscured, subsumed or lost in the environments around them. “There is an aspect of performance to this type of photography I really enjoy,” Brooke tells It’s Nice That. “I’m not creating these backdrops; I’m simply using them as a stage.”

“I like to focus on the quiet things that I feel deserve attention,” says illustrator Anna Roberts about her hyperreal artworks. From a bag of juicy oranges so real you can almost hear the plastic rustle to light shining through a glass of water with perfect precision, her artworks are so true to life that it’s only after considerable attention that you work out Anna’s quiet moments aren’t in fact photographs.

Humankind’s relationship to drinking water has developed into what can only be described as a toxic one. This is particularly true in our cities where tensions surrounding water have resulted in many calling for a ban on single-use, disposable plastic bottles. In what is the beginning of a year-long programme, A/D/O has launched the Water Futures Design Challenge. An incentivised contest, it “challenges designers and creators to conceptualise and imagine innovative new ways to solve this global crisis.”

Publishing a new body of work by photographer Harley Weir, Baron’s latest issue Function explores the conflicting messages we’re exposed to surrounding the “purpose” of the female body. The brazen set of fashion and documentary images, art directed by Jamie Reid, present sexual desire and reproduction alongside one another – for example showing the female nipple as both an erogenous zone and a feeding station, and, in turn, how it simultaneously causes desire and disgust. These are curated in the book to examine human biology and how it’s represented in society.

Sometimes it’s the projects that never make it out into the real world that are the most fascinating. Without being watered down by rounds of client tweaks, you can really see the inner workings of a designer’s brain. Or that’s how we feel about Haw-lin Services’s concept identity for Berlin Biennale 9, which the duo just popped up on their site. Working on the projected with former HORT colleague Tim Schmitt, the typographic-led identity is a slick medley of sci-films and corporate culture. And, although unused, is an interesting musing on the role of corporate sponsorship in the art world.

In 2019, the iconic 1960s roundabout in Old Street, London, will be entirely removed and a two-way traffic system introduced, creating a new public space. As part of the regeneration, Islington Council in partnership with the Mayor of London, Transport for London and Hackney Council asked designers to consider how the street could look after the roundabout is removed. Four winning concepts have now been chosen from a long-list of 39 designers which included Zaha Hadid Architects and Es Devlin.