Review of the Year 2023: Top 25 Features

This year’s most-read long-reads on It’s Nice That spanned dating, grief, age, rejection and spirituality, via design for real-life cities and fictional worlds, and interviews with the likes of Joe Lycett and Lotte Wubben-Moy. As always, it’s been a rollercoaster! Coming out on top in 2023 were two in-depth features analysing brand design from very different angles. One, by Elizabeth Goodspeed, looked at rebrands for the commercial sector, and why they’re starting to fall on the same visual conventions. Another, by Ayla Angelos, peeked behind the curtain of fake brands made for the big and small screen. Both were packed in insights and design inspiration, so it’s no wonder they had you clicking in your droves.

Elsewhere, Liz Gorny spoke to dating app designers and users for our feature on how design has changed how we date; and Dalia Dawood took a walk through what it’s like to brand a city, juggling history, culture and, importantly, its people. Ugonna-Ora Owoh spoke to creatives and a psychologist about the pros and cons of being an introvert when navigating the creative industry; while Ritupriya Basu explored how designers are managing to create long-lasting work in a creative landscape that seems ever-more-rapidly shifting. Danielle Pender’s piece on creative grief looked at the feelings of loss of control and identity after a project ends, and strategies for processing this period of mourning to effectively move on; while Olivia Hingley dissected what might happen to the creative industry with cuts to state school arts provision (spoiler alert: it’s not good).

This was also the year the brilliant Yaya Azariah Clarke joined our team, and this October they penned an intricate, multi-layered feature on the state of the creative industry from a Black perspective. We urge you to read its personal accounts of the “Black renaissance” from a range of Black creatives, examining what has changed and what hasn’t, since 2020.