Wix Playground hosts an It's Nice That event in New York focused on digital design

It’s Nice That is heading to New York! We’ve teamed up with website-building platform Wix and are all set to host a very special event in the company’s Wix Playground space in Chelsea: an evening focused on design in the digital age. Join us on Thursday 17 January for an inspirational evening packed with great creative work and lively conversation. Click here to sign up for your free ticket.

Part of the Wix Playground Presents series, the evening will be hosted by It’s Nice That and will feature talks from four world-renowned designers, artists and illustrators: Zach Lieberman, Carly Ayres, Ekene Ijeoma and Nicole Ginelli (you’ll find more information on all these great guest speakers below). Each of these creatives is pushing the boundaries of their field in a unique way, using technology and digital tools to achieve things that were previously unimaginable.

Before and after the talks, all the speakers (as well as the It’s Nice That team) will be around, so you’ll have a chance to meet them over a beer and a pretzel. Read on to learn a bit more about the speakers and what they’ll be talking about.

Zach Lieberman

Zach is an artist, researcher and educator with one simple goal: he wants to surprise you. In his work, he creates performances and installations that take human gestures as input and amplify them in different ways: making drawings come to life, imagining what the voice might look like if we could see it, transforming people’s silhouettes into music. His projects have garnered him many prizes, including the Golden Nica from Ars Electronica and Interactive Design of the Year from Design Museum London. He creates artwork through writing software, is a co-creator of the open-source C++ toolkit for creative coding, openFrameworks, and helped co-found the School for Poetic Computation, a school examining the lyrical possibilities of code.

Carly Ayres

Carly is a partner at HAWRAF, a design and technology-design studio that engages people in new and interesting ways. In 2017, she was named by FastCompany as one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business. From sound-reactive identities to mirrored selfie posters, HAWRAF helps brands have better conversations. Launched in 2016, the Brooklyn-based studio has worked with large companies including Google, Facebook, Hasbro and Buzzfeed, as well as independent artists and designers such as Taeyoon Choi, Mark Horowitz, Visibility, and CW&T. Before HAWRAF, Carly worked as a writer humanising artificial intelligence and evolving the Google logo.

Ekene Ijeoma

Ekene creates artworks that sit at the intersection of life experiences and data studies, poetic acts and analytic insights, and aesthetic quality and social efficacy. His works embody social issues and expose the systems affecting us as individuals. For instance, his projects have included a website visualising racial inequality in the design industry and a music performance and sound-reactive light installation that sonified mass incarceration. His artworks have been commissioned and presented by Modern Museum of Art, Museum of the City of New York, The Kennedy Center, Design Museum, Istanbul Design Biennial, Fondation EDF, and many more besides. He was recently appointed as an assistant professor, founder and director of the Poetic Justice group at MIT Media Lab.

Nicole Ginelli

Nicole is a Brooklyn-based independent art director, illustrator and animator. Known for her work with MTV, Warner Music, Vice, Giphy, Bloomberg, and Medium, she taught herself how to illustrate in her spare time while working as a UI designer. Nicole has always worked at the intersections of media and design, previously the editorial art director at Bandcamp and an interactive designer at Pitchfork.