Technicolour designs and free flowing shapes: Nicelab studio are here to grab your attention

Here at It’s Nice That, it goes without saying that we have a serious soft spot for all things ‘nice’. And so you can imagine our pleasure when we stumbled across Nicelab Studio, whose work is, well, really quite nice. With a technicolour palette and soft, pleasing shapes the Beijing-based studio has completed work for health food brands to children’s clothing companies. Approaching every project with an open mind and brains full of fresh ideas, the studio somehow still manages to get its signature style Nicelab-stamp on everything it does.

One of the ways in which the studio creates this diversity throughout its portfolio is letting each member of the studio’s personal style run free. “We do not have a prescribed design direction”, the studio outlines, “as long as it fits the requirements of the project, everyone can express their own thoughts.” With a healthy mix of people at different stages in their career – some who are long-term designers, some who’ve recently graduated, and some who’ve come to design later in life – the studio prides itself on taking a liberal and unbiased approach to everyone’s ideas. This, the studio continues, is also where it sees its vivid and very “unserious” work as stemming from.

Nicelab most commonly completes work for new brands, and after years of practice, it can safely say that bright colours are the best way to capture people’s attention. By using vivid hues, this means the studio can “directly stimulate consumer’s good impressions toward products”. By extension, the studio sees this approach as an important way to adapt in an increasingly online world; especially as newer brands are now predominantly selling their goods online. “There are higher requirements online, like colour of the product, and how interesting the illustration is, because internet consumers can easily lose their attention to products due to such high densities of information.”

These ideas translate brilliantly to Nicelab’s work for LF Herby, a Chinese traditional herb brand. Featuring two types of vitamin, ones that aids sleep and one that helps increase energy levels, the client wanted the packaging to have a “ceremonial” feel that incorporated traditional Chinese iconography. With each vitamin intended for the different poles of the day, the studio landed on a set of graphics derived from lunar cycles. Using earthy oranges to contrast with deep, vibrant blue and circular shapes, the designs are a testament to the simple yet effective approach. And, to add further layers to an already brilliant design, the inside of the boxes harbour an entirely different design to the one on the outside, creating a sense of “ceremony” when opening the box.

Not all of Nicelab’s work is created with the visual sphere in mind, however. This can be seen in its series of posters and product designs for Open Day, a designer activity the studio has planned to celebrate its third year anniversary. Organised with the hopes that soon “everyone can return to the traditional form of face-to-face communication”, the studio riffed off one of its unified pleasures in life – shopping. Designing the posters to emulate those you would find in a shopping mall and arranging the event site to mirror one too, the overall aesthetic is bold, hectic with a tumbling, dancing type that has us in awe. Nicelab really is a studio that puts the ‘nice’ in It’s Nice That.