Us By Night’s return is a raucous and rousing success

After Us By Night’s 2020 edition was cancelled by the pandemic, it didn’t return for the following three years, and it felt like the creative industry had lost its really fun, really energetic best mate. So when word came about that it was returning in 2024, people were overjoyed, expectations were high – and rightfully so. With three days of over 60 creative talks across three stages, spoilt for choice doesn’t even cut it; every hour marked a deliberation that felt near impossible to solve. And every evening ended in a club night, with live acts and DJs taking to the stage. That’s not even mentioning all the other activities on offer: in between talks, attendees played Super Mario on big screens, grappled with four-way ping pong (which became more hilariously chaotic as the evenings went on), ate delicious food, got massages, spray-painted luggage (courtesy of a fun activation by sponsor Eastpak) and, slowly but surely, took to a bustling dance floor below the biggest disco ball you’ve ever seen. The festival is a unique blend of conference and rave, the perfect combination of inspiration, fun and community that the creative industry is so desperately in need of – and It’s Nice That had the pleasure of being there.

Thursday on the Soo Good stage opened with insight, eloquence and drama. Yes, It’s Nice That delivered one of the first talks of the whole festival… but you’re not here to hear about us, are you? One of Thursday’s Main Stage talks was Bas van de Poel, the co-founder of Modem, an office for design and innovation. Bas opened by talking about the fact that the office has an end date (1 January 2030) and how that impacts the way it works, especially in the way it selects projects to work on. It makes every choice, every step, and every idea count. While Bas said Modem recognises how worrying living in a time of “exponential technology” can be (and the fact that tech CEOs are “the new rock stars”) we need to still engage with it, anticipate its possible growth and respond to it, albeit responsibly. Modem has done so with a speculative design project to see how generative AI could create products that help put certain healthcare systems in the hands of people – like heart monitoring – as a means of tackling health inequality. Another was Terra, a pocket-sized compass that used AI and “the wisdom of mindfulness” to help people find the wanderer within them, without having to resort to Google Maps.

AI continued to be a hot topic throughout the festival, but perhaps not in the ways we expected. It turns out that while there’s a lot of fear around what the burgeoning tech represents, lots of creatives are using it, and in pretty creative ways – like Danaé Gosset, the mixed media animator and founder of Pencil TV. We got a look into Danaé’s incredibly vast portfolio, including work for Nike and Hermès, music videos for the late Mac Miller and a particularly impressive one for Tsha’s song Running, which visualises a “bad acid trip” that you can’t escape from. Seeing just how much work goes into every single frame of these animations, by the end it was no wonder Danaé’s small studio uses AI to streamline her work, giving her more time to get stuck into the varied analogue process that still make up the bulk of her practice.

On Friday, the Main Stage got a full New York take over. The city’s “unofficial talent scout” New York Nico – more formally known as Nicolas Heller – took to the stage, and shone light on just how he goes about finding the city’s wackiest events and most characterful individuals. Alongside his widely loved Instagram account, Nicolas also dove into his other work – Heller Films – through which he makes commercials for New York institutions, like The Nicks, often using the characters he spotlights. But the heartwarming (and hilarious) star of the show was a screening of one of his series of short documentaries, which took a behind-the-scenes look into one of New York’s oldest barbershops – Astor Place – centring on its enigmatic manager of 40 years, a lunch-break painter and wine-drinker called Big Mike. Nicolas ended by teasing his book, New York Nico’s Guide to NYC, as a means of replying to his most received DM: “Hey, I’m coming to New York, what should I do?”

Fellow New Yorker and creative director of character design for Sesame Workshop, Louis Henry Mitchell, followed, and proved that one of the most anticipated talks of the festival was truly worth the wait. You see, the thing is, Louis can’t really describe his “job” as a job because he loves it so much; from his childhood obsession with Sesame Street creator Jim Henson, to persistently knocking on their door for work, to a 32-year career at the Street, his dream really did come true. Louis gave a fascinating run-down of some of his best anecdotes from the past three decades, including Kermit the Frog getting lost by FedEx, the uproar when it got leaked that the Cookie Monster’s name might be changed to the Vegetable Monster, styling an award-winning photoshoot for Google, and creating the first muppet with Autism, and secretly basing a character on his own son. It doesn’t get more moving than this.

As well as established figures like Louis, there was also a large collection of young creatives paving the way for a new kind of industry on stage. Like Victor Verhelst, who combines complex digital pattern with traditional textile techniques (and whose works lined the walls of the Soo Good stage he spoke on); Vera Van Der Seyp, a creative leading the way in generative coding who’s also set upon making the tech industry more accessible through online conferences; Joseph Melhuish, who’s making a stir with his jaw-dropping talents in VR; and Shamma Buhazza, whose practice is dedicated to challenging the regularity at which Western design is presented as the cannon, instead shining a light on the vast creative history and potential of her Abu-Dhabi home.

Saturday opened with the Rotterdam-based studio From Form, led by Ashley Govers and Jurjen Versteeg, who happen to be a couple as well as creative partners. Kicking off with the analogue ethos that sits behind all of their work, they broke down some of their most recent projects, including a sneak peek of their upcoming 80s sci-fi infused identity for Amsterdam’s Museum Night. Thought they couldn’t top last year’s flip-book masterpiece? They might well have done just that. But the latter half of their talk focused on one of their longest running personal projects, a short film called Two Deserts. After a trip to LA, the pair became obsessed with deserts and the myth-making that surrounds them, leading them down a path of uncovering a beautifully designed magazine from the 1960s, and numerous similarity desert-obsessed individuals with whom they’ve become close collaborators, and friends. Ashley and Jurjen’s talk, overall, became a moving love letter to the passion project.

For Slang Inc (Julian Alexander), the designer behind 50 Cent’s iconic album Get Rich or Die Tryin’, and Snakebone (Julian Adon Alexander), the illustrator who’s become widely loved for emotive charcoal works that blend portraiture with anime imagery, there was one resounding theme: family. Sharing a stage, the father and son explored just what it meant to have someone so central to your life that you were able to connect with creatively, when you need advice, and when you need nurturing. Each delved into their personal journeys, how Julian Jr moved from large paintings, to A4 charcoal pieces, while Julian Snr has recently transitioned graphic design on a screen, to large paintings and outdoor art through his Supremacy project, it was clear that behind everything – even solo work – their relationship was the backbone. “I’m proud to be an artist,” said Julian Snr. “But I’m more proud to see my son find his artistic way.”

This time round, when it came to installations and activations, the mirrors on the six-metre-wide disco ball weren’t the only shiny reflective surfaces making a splash in the warehouse. The creative studio Elastique brought its interactive installation, Mirror Me, which sees two collaborative robot arms move mirrors around your body, paired with a choice of four soundscapes, and piercing light. The striking experience – which saw its first presentation at a church in Cologne – is cinematic and eerie in equal measure, and the studio says it aims to become “a hyper-charged echo-chamber of our ego”.

All the while, Meta sent along its AR Ray-Bans to capture the event from attendees' point of view, using tech launched just days before at Meta Connect.

Finally, in true Us By Night fashion, it ended in a massive final party. When the director David Wilson wrapped up his headline speaker slot (suitably dressed in a bright pink blow up suit), he led a conga dance to the mirror ball, and the night descended into one of his iconic cabaret parties, filled with pole dancing, diamante-clad American Football players, and a lot of spilled milk (no tears, though). It was a brilliantly raucous ending, to a brilliant three days.