Talia Cotton, Base Design, Fumi Nagasaka and Richard A Chance: Tickets now available for November’s Nicer Tuesdays in New York!

New Yorkers! We’ll be knocking on your door once more for our final stateside edition of Nicer Tuesdays in 2024. Autumn is fully upon us, and there’s no better way to see the cold nights away than huddled up inside with some creative inspiration and a drink (or two).

This time round we’ll be welcoming Base Design’s Mirek Nisenbaum to talk all things website design, alongside the renowned documentary and portrait photographer Fumi Nagasaka and the illustrator Richard A Chance, who’ll be diving into how he tackles an editorial brief. Finally, the designer and coder Talia Cotton will be sitting down with Elizabeth Goodspeed for a Q&A that will touch on tech, leaving Pentagram, and taking the leap to start her own venture – Cotton.

The renowned papersmiths GF Smith will be taking over the walls of the Music Hall of Williamsburg to showcase the work of up-and-coming design students from Manchester School of Art, one of the UK’s top arts schools. So if you’ve ever fancied a good old nosey into what design students in the UK are producing, now’s your chance to find out. The students have been tasked with creating a 12” vinyl record cover that responds to a soundscape created to represent the 55 colours of GF Smith’s signature Colorplan paper range: expect beautiful results!

The event will take place on Tuesday 12 November at Music Hall of Williamsburg: 66 N 6th St, Brooklyn, NY 11211. Doors will open at 6pm and the talks will begin at 7.15pm. It’s a seated event, so get there early to ensure a seat and pick up a drink beforehand! Tickets are $20 + fees.

Please be aware that photography and filming may be taken at this event for marketing and promotional purposes. If you do not want to be photographed or filmed, please speak to our team on the day. Also, if you are in need of disability access, please email [email protected] so we can arrange assistance with the venue team.

Talia Cotton is a designer who’s got a way with words – specifically, making them move and morph in awe-inspiring ways. Previously, she worked at New York’s Pentagram office, leading data-driven and algorithmic brand identity and website projects. In 2023, she left Pentagram to set up her own creative agency and consultancy, Cotton, an outfit that taps into her specialisms, situated at the intersection between design and code, its core aim to bring the burgeoning tech into its full potential. In just a year and a half, Cotton has completed a generative identity for Creative Week, an interactive identity and website for the architecture studio Almost, and an interactive experience for Marc Jacobs. She’ll be sitting down with our US editor-at-large to discuss her career so far, and making the leap to set up her own agency.

How do you make a really brilliant website? One that makes the user stick around, rather than causing their cursor to gravitate toward the back button? Base Design’s Mirek Nisenbaum, partner and digital director at Base’s New York office will be talking us through his concept of “Digital Magnetism”, the process of emphasising the emotional impact of web design through, beauty, authenticity and energy. He'll be referencing Base's website design and development for the Studio Museum in Harlem as a case study, as well as drawing on the trials and errors that come part-in-parcel of a creative website.

In 2002, Fumi Nagaska moved from Nagoya in Japan to New York City to work as a freelance photographer for the iconic magazine Street. Now a seasoned New Yorker, in recent years Fumi’s turned her gaze to the country she’s now lived in for over two decades, trying to capture an accurate portrayal of such a vast place. This has resulted in a series following her next door neighbours, a single mother and her two daughters, and Dora Yerwood, Walker Country, Alabama, a seven year exploration of a small town in southern America, which traversed churches, cheerleading practices, and people’s living rooms and was published in a photobook by Gost late last year. At Nicer Tuesdays she’ll be talking about her inspirations, practice and processes.

The list of publications that Richard A Chance’s illustrations have been featured in is about as long as your arm (if your arm is really long, that is). It includes The New Yorker, New York Times, Wired, Fast Company, Entertainment Weekly, The Washington Post, and many more, who keep coming back for his brilliant ability to capture people’s character, and his deft use of shading and colour pairing. Richard’s clearly got the style locked down, but how does he actually do it? At Nicer Tuesdays he’ll be talking us through the whole process, from working out how to translate the story, to collaborating with art directors.