Take a Look at This Year's Work From Britain's Most-Watched Creative Graduates

Imagination is always captivating.

The creative design and art community site It's Nice That has announced this year's winners of its The Graduates project. Out of more than 1,000 applications from university graduates, it picked 11 "of the best young artists and designers," working in illustration, graphic design, photography, art and animation, and gave each of them funding.

It's Nice That posts creative work from around the world every day, follows new design talent and argues for mixing creativity with art and design. The Graduates, which started in 2009, is its platform for finding that new talent: every year it picks out art and design graduates who have drawn attention and backs them as they build a practice.

Its partner on the project is A/D/O, a creative space in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. A/D/O belongs to the design arm of the car brand MINI and sets out to explore the new edges of design. At its center is a design academy that runs a series of programs for professional designers, meant to spark and sustain their work. It also houses a design store and a restaurant, NORMAN.

Many of the young creatives A/D/O backed in the 2016 Graduates project have had small successes after a year of trying things out. Hong Kong animator Vera Babida made the nominations list for the BAFTA awards (British Academy of Film and Television Arts); London designer Ben Leonard joined the well-known graphic design firm Pentagram; London animator Jennifer Zhang joined MOTH, an animation studio with a long list of international prizes; and fashion and portrait photographer Sophie Mayanne picked up clients including the youth-culture outlet Dazed, The Sunday Times Magazine, Glamcult, Sony Music and Universal Music.

The 11 people chosen this year will also join A/D/O's creative network. A/D/O will pay for a trip to New York for them and put together a set of programs built around what each of them needs.

Here is the work of this year's young artists and designers.

Illustrator Joey Yu

Joey Yu graduated in illustration and animation from Kingston University, on the Thames, and now and then takes the lead on a project as a curator.

University put her in the way of students from every discipline: "Maybe today you'll have lunch with a product designer or a furniture designer, and then run into a fashion student while queuing for the bathroom." Those chances to talk with creative people in other fields shaped the way she works. She likes to concentrate on her own illustration, and she also likes working with cross-disciplinary teams in fashion design, performance and industrial design.

She thinks there is too much she cannot predict in the way she works to box herself into one style; much of what she makes comes from an idea that arrives without warning, or from drawing with no plan at all. Anti Assimilation Wear, the project she was picked for, is made up entirely of drawings she put on the backs of receipts whenever inspiration came. The pictures have a lazy, unhurried air and a messy line, but the states the people in them are in come through vividly.

Graphic Designer Ben Hutchings

Ben Hutchings graduated in graphic design from Central Saint Martins in London. His projects have drawn a good deal of attention over the past few years, among them work for New York's Mostly Mozart Festival and the Italian pasta company De Cecco.

The festival logo stands out in particular. Ben Hutchings took a three-dimensional letter M and added the refraction of a prism to it, producing an unexpected portrait of Mozart. The It's Nice That judges said of the work: "When we found out Ben was still a student, we knew there were greater things to expect."

His packaging for the pasta brand De Cecco shows a spare, mathematical taste. The three-dimensional effect built out of a black-and-white grid is an attempt to play a small visual game with the shopper.

Photographer Luke Withers

Luke Withers, born in Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland, studied documentary photography at the University of South Wales.

Territorial Volumes, the project he is working on now, shows plainly how strong the documentary streak in his photography is: a series of pictures that looks straight at Gibraltar, caught in the territorial dispute between Britain and Spain. But he does not train his eye on the dispute itself. He steps past the question of sovereignty and looks instead at where Gibraltar gets its fresh water.

Gibraltar has no rivers and no lakes. For much of its history it got by on collected rainwater, which brought repeated outbreaks of cholera and yellow fever. Today it depends entirely on desalinated seawater, and it also runs a second seawater network for sanitation.

Luke says: "What I really want to explore is how people, in a place that isn't really fit to live in, fight with its natural resources and then survive."

Artist Morgan Ward

"Don't make work that tries to give answers. Make work that lets people ask questions." That line, picked up at a talk, has become something close to Morgan Ward's working creed.

Morgan Ward graduated from the University of Chichester. His series of abstract works explore color and space by exaggerating both.

One question keeps coming back to him: how far is painting a process of identifying the self, and how far is the making of it driven by an inner logic?

Illustrator Molly Fairhurst

At this year's East London graffiti art festival, the illustrator Molly Fairhurst showed the public her playful side. Doing things that are "always fun" is what this young artist asks of herself.

Lately she has been experimenting with ways to express the power of the body and states of motion. Take the series Kick Don't Twist: some pieces put across joy through exaggerated poses, while others borrow the feeling of being ill to let anger out.

Photographer Maxwell Granger

Maxwell Granger, born in North Yorkshire, graduated from the London College of Communication. Studying illustration and visual media woke up his sense of himself and a strong curiosity.

His best-known work is a set of teenage portraits shot for Forever magazine with the sportswear brand Converse. Heavy with nostalgia, the pictures sketch a millennial street scene, with the swagger, the restlessness and the anxiety that leaks out now and then, all of it particular to adolescence. The young people in front of his camera wear comically round glasses and dreadlocks, some with braces on their teeth, grinning slyly.

Animator Katy Wang

In the animated short CONTACT trailer, Katy Wang tells the story of a journey between the stars. The hand-drawn sets and characters are fine and delicate, and the film came out of a long-distance relationship.

CONTACT trailer was Katy Wang's graduation piece at Kingston University, and the most ambitious storytelling project she has attempted. "The story started with a long-distance relationship I was in, the loneliness it brought and the urge to stay in touch with the other person every minute," Katy said. She was deeply interested in space at the time, and on a visit to an exhibition at the Science Museum she fell for the astronauts' retro spacesuits, so those elements found their way into her characters.

Photographer Giya Makondo-Wills

Giya Makondo-Wills describes herself as "someone with a habit of collecting odds and ends." Anecdotes, research subjects, things she remembers — she likes to gather it all up and keep it together.

Three years of documentary photography at the University of South Wales trained her to tell a story the way a photographer does. She used to worry about her racial identity; now she can walk with confidence into an industry that may still be mostly white and middle-class.

Doyenne, the project she is working on now, records her two grandmothers, one living in the suburbs of East Sussex, the other in a small town near Johannesburg. "The process of shooting really changed my relationship with them. I began to see them again as living individuals in their own right, and not simply as my grandmothers."

Another of Giya's projects is tied to her identity too, this one about racial discrimination and colonialism. "A lot of the ideas for it come out of conversations with my parents, my relationship with my country, and memories of my childhood."

Illustrator Jiye Kim

exaggeration, narrative and movement is Jiye Kim's newest series. These illustrations of fast movement set out to describe the picture a camera freezes in an instant.

She graduated in illustration and animation from Kingston University, and her work is strongly experimental. The pieces in this series are all still illustrations, but what they carry is motion, sometimes very fast motion: the instant a badminton racket swings, the moment the shuttlecock hits the ground, a close-up of someone bent low over the pedals of a bike, or of a basketball shot. Each one brings the picture to life.

Almost no two of Jiye's series look alike, but the intricate, finely worked detail in her images has become her signature.

Illustrator Jamie Edler

"As a creative person, I find it hard to like my own work, because I lived through the whole process of making it, while everyone else sees only the result."

That thought followed Jamie Edler for a long time, but he is now trying hard to be proud of what he makes.

What caught the judges' eye was a series of posters on Asian cinema, among them Wong Kar-wai's Chungking Express and In the Mood for Love. The posters use a range of grayed-down colors, and treating complicated subjects with a light, funny hand is a direction Jamie Edler keeps working in. The work he chose makes that plain: neither Tsai Ming-liang's The Wayward Cloud nor Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore is easy material (though what he did with them in the end was quite direct — taking an image straight out of the novel or the film).

Graphic Designer Tom Baber

Tom Baber's mother shaped him deeply. "My mom is a graphic designer. I remember when her friends had babies, she'd spell out the child's name in bright colored letters and then draw little animals climbing over them. I always thought that was such a cool thing to do."

That set off Tom Baber's strong interest in color and letters. "Doing graphic design with color and letters — that's something I could play with all day."

Tom Baber, a graduate of the London College of Communication, works on type and typography. He wants to slow down in a fast age, and he likes making things that feel handmade: practicing calligraphy, carving letters by hand, making a book, ideally the kind of work done far from a computer screen. He still remembers what his tutor Paul McNeil told him: "You can't reinvent the alphabet. You can only give it different ways of being presented."

Tom Baber said: "I like to dress letters up to suit different occasions, the same way you wouldn't wear a football kit to a wedding. Get the occasion wrong and it really shows."

Image source: It's Nice That