How to create an impactful side project: Get your tickets for May’s Nicer Tuesdays Online!

Update: Due to unforeseen circumstances, we’re excited to be welcoming photographer Kate Prior to May’s line-up in place of Daniel Gebhart de Koekoek. Daniel will hopefully be able to join us at an event later this year.

Whether you’re just starting out in the creative industry or a household name with a team of dozens beneath you, there is one kind of project that supersedes all, wherever you are in the world: the side project. This month, we’re dedicating Nicer Tuesdays to these weird and wonderful ventures, welcoming two stellar speakers with side projects of note, stopping over at Cairo and London along the way. 

First, we’ve got an illustrator who switched to cheffing during lockdown, Kate Prior. After moving to a new area at the beginning of lockdown, Kate and her partner Ugo set up a pop-up pizza joint to get to know their neighbours, now known as Short Road Pizza. We’re also very excited to welcome Archief Cairo to the online stage, a design collective exploring the future of Arabic visual culture. On the last Tuesday of this month (25 May 2021 at 6 pm BST), two of its co-founders, Maram Al Refaei and Hana Neuman, will be talking us through their one-of-a-kind side project, reviving a letterpress at Cairo’s French Institute of Oriental Archaeology, a museum which houses the only letterpress with hieroglyphics in the world.

Pay what you can with our tiered payment system and grab yourself a ticket below. Also, did you know that if you join Extra Nice, It’s Nice That’s new membership programme, you’ll automatically receive a ticket every month for Nicer Tuesdays Online, for the entire year? That’s just one of the many perks that make Extra Nice so special. To find out more about this and all the other benefits of joining Extra Nice, head over to the dedicated part of our site.

Kate Prior

When lockdown paused daily life in the UK in March of 2020, Kate and her partner Ugo were experiencing a fair few life adjustments at the time. Having recently moved to a new neighbourhood, the pair (for obvious reasons) were unable to become familiar with the ins and outs of the area, or get to know their new neighbours. Yet, when Ugo bought a pizza oven to keep the couple occupied, the pair decided it was the perfect excuse to reach out, fancying it “a better way to introduce ourselves,” she tells It’s Nice That.

Over 100 pizzas and over £1,000 raised for their neighbourhood food bank, Short Road Pizza has now grown into a regular pop-up in her area of Leyton, east London. It offers completely different creative opportunities to her usual illustration practice, and Kate will join us at Nicer Tuesdays to discuss how this surprising side project has grown, as well as what cheffing and managing Short Road Pizza has taught her about creativity.

Archief Cairo 

Established in 2018, Archief Cairo is a multilingual lab for research, preservation and communication founded by Hana Neuman, Maram Al Refaei, Sherine Salla and Ryan Vicente Lee Grees. A design collective that started by documenting the vernacular of the street, it has captured the visual essence of the Egyptian capital through a series of explorative projects focusing on how Arabic visual culture is perceived through the five senses. Touching on Cairo’s unique creative scene and the rich cultural history that informs it, the collective will also, interestingly, discuss a side project like no other. Approximately a year before the pandemic, Archief Cairo started work reviving a letterpress at the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology which houses the only letterpress with hieroglyphics in the world. Talking us through the cultural significance of this project and revealing hidden insights into this typographic wonder, Archief Cairo will also share its ethos of using the street to delve into “unknown, forgotten or almost disappearing knowledge”.