Introducing It’s Nice That’s first ever Preview of the Year

Fed up of reading your distant acquaintances’ end-of-the-decade humble brags on social media? Glad to have left the extended family behind and be returning to civilisation? Ready to get stuck into a new year full of promise and purpose? Then welcome to Preview of the Year, our all-new guide to the next 12 months and what to expect from the world of creativity – a companion piece to our more reflective Review of the Year.

Below you’ll find a host of stories and opinion pieces looking ahead to 2020 and offering thoughts, insights and predictions on the future. We’ve tapped up some of our favourite creatives across various disciplines – graphic design, photography, illustration and animation, advertising, and tech – and asked them to take a guess at what’s going to be leading the agenda in the year ahead.

We’ve also compiled our very own survival kit for 2020, with the help of the upcycling queen Nicole McLaughlin. And we’ve asked creative coder Neal Agarwal, writer Almaz Ohene, and Michal Sloboda, one of the co-founders of trend-spotting blog Trend List, for their hopes and dreams for the next 12 months and beyond.

Looking over the horizon at the big moments that are set to dominate the headlines this year, we spotted two momentous stories that we felt deserved a more creative take: the Olympic and Paralympic Games in Tokyo this summer and the US presidential elections coming up in November. So, we asked four of our favourite designers and illustrators from Japan to create two alternative mascots for their home country’s Summer Games; and asked three American comics artists to depict across four panels their aspirations and predictions for the historic election in the US. The outcomes are by turns amusing and poignant.

There are a tonne of smaller stories within these stories, but we’ll let you explore and discover those for yourself. We hope this Preview of the Year gets the creative juices flowing after the festive break and helps you put your best foot forward in 2020.

We hope you have a positive and, above all, fulfilling start to the year!

The It’s Nice That team

Supported by Google

Google is proud to support It’s Nice That’s Preview of the Year in championing a broad and inclusive creative community. We believe that design is critical to building great products and experiences, and we’re committed to supporting best-in-class efforts like Material Design – a unified system combining theory, resources, and tools to help designers and developers craft beautiful, digital experiences – and Google Design. At Google Design, we produce original articles and videos, host events, and champion creative and educational partnerships, with the goal of supporting and inspiring designers and design technologists. Sign up for the Google Design Newsletter to learn more.