Journal

In a headwind, sustainability comms need clarity, creativity, and conviction. Tom Tapper explores six steps to stay on course - from choosing your language carefully, meeting your audience where they are, and telling human stories over technical jargon, you can cut through the headwinds and keep momentum on your side.

Nicely Said is our conversational series, offering informal, open discussions that spotlight the people behind the agency and their experiences in the industry. In the first edition, Tiz chats with Georgia, our newest and youngest team member. Georgia reflects on her journey since graduating in 2021, her work in small studios and academia, and her passion for accessible, sustainable, and purpose-led design.

Yumna Matar, our Senior Project manager explains how to help your comms connect with a global audience.

We’ve said no to single-use plastics like bags, straws, and cotton buds, but balloons are still getting a free pass. Why?

In ‘Ban The Balloon’, Zoe, our Strategist, breaks down the 6 steps of behaviour change communications needed to shift public perception and drive action.

In our panel discussion with Maybelline New York, Vodafone and Art Fund, we discover how you can invite your audience into the full creative process to strike the right chord, with the right people, when it matters most.

Harriet Kindleysides, our Senior Strategist, shares our top three learnings for working with Creative Councils, and why they should become a key part of the project process.

The shifts in our climate are gigantic, yet the metrics we use to tell the story are tiny. Tom Tapper makes a call for more meaningful metrics that give us a better sense of scale of the crises, or ideally, eye-opening visuals and analogies.

Are we trying to fit the square peg of marketing, into a circular hole? To answer this question, we brought together a panel of three insightful practitioners; people working for brands who are piloting and implementing products and services to get the wheels of the circular economy turning; eBay, IKEA and Too Good To Go.

What will be cool? What will be not-so-cool? What the heck is retro-futurism and how can we design for everyone? These are just a few of the questions our Design Lead, Sam Perkins, looks to answer in the first annual Nice and Serious Trend Forecast.

Tech is a male dominated industry, with only 26% of women in the workforce. Our brilliant web developer, Michelle Clement, challenged the stereotype and made the career change from marketing manager to web developer, all while pregnant with her daughter. This is her story...

Nice and Serious is a creative agency making work the world needs. But we're also an agency in progress, which we explore in our 2022 Impact Report…

Hayley Dunlop, Copywriter at Nice and Serious, reflects on making the switch to creative agency life after two decades in-house.

As we prepare our recertification, we want to support the first timers with our first-hand experience of becoming a B Corp creative agency.

We depend on words when we communicate sustainability.

A striking image or a clever visual metaphor can land an idea in a quarter of the time taken to read a paragraph.

We need to get behind the organisations who are fighting to fill our world with hope. That’s why we are excited to announce that applications are now open for our 2023 Pro Bono UK Charity Partnership!

Never underestimate the power of a playful brand mascot. They are perhaps marketing's best kept secret. But can you recall a sustainable, or another purpose-driven, brand that has a playful, lovable character?

The sustainability sector is awash with acronyms and jargon. While these can be annoying and often bewildering, the bigger concern is the euphemisms we’ve become accustomed to using in sustainability communications.

As an editor, I spend my life deconstructing and reconstructing stories. I've hand-picked five of my favourites that we’ve produced as an agency, pairing each video with a lesson to create an impact for the story being told.

Over the past few months Good Club and Nice and Serious have been on a journey, looking at the sector and how we are positioning ourselves.

A short exploration into who (or what) is redefining the sustainable design landscape. Uncovering six signals that are shifting sustainable branding from lagging behind to leading the way.

Atomic stories evoke empathy - an emotion that’s thought to be unique to humans. It’s empathy that enables us to imagine a different reality to our own.

The story of how the Moral Compass came into being.

Reflections on the importance of purpose when the world is in a state of constant crisis.

While a circular economy will present huge challenges to most brands' conventional business models, there are huge opportunities for those who embrace and adapt to this change. We explored why those who drag their heels with incremental changes will undoubtedly fall behind.

We're seeing more sustainable startups than ever before, which is a good thing. But so many fall into the same trap when it comes to branding.

In this article, Nice and Serious' co-founder Tom Tapper discusses the agency’s journey towards B Corp certification and why he believes that business should be a force for good.

Are we living in an era of imagination austerity? Here are my thoughts about the role charities can play in bringing their visions of a positive future to life.

Why is it that so many sustainability campaigns flop? Big targets are set, reports are written, ducks are put in a row, yet more often than not they fail to get the attention they deserve. While it's not everything, the branding of a sustainability programme can make it or break it. In many respects, it's a bit like lighting a fire. Let me explain...

USELESS is a beautifully designed website to help cut plastic waste by helping people to easily find their local zero-waste shop. It was an international success with the site being used by over 50,000 people in the first month. These are the three reasons why I think it works.

The way we approach brainstorms is fundamentally flawed. To develop truly great creative ideas, we first need to learn how to develop more bad ones. We need to trick our mind into entering a childlike state. A state which allows for an unrestricted flow of thought. Here's the process we use at Nice and Serious.

Corporate sustainability reports take a huge amount of time and energy to create, but rarely get read. Here's the story of how we transformed Heineken USA's sustainability report into a campaign that their audience actually engaged with.

Since 2008, we’ve produced thousands of videos for charities. Some have been a big success, others less so. But over time we’ve seen a familiar pattern emerge; the faces of five fiendish villains we all struggle to fight. We’ve painted a picture of those villains along with our tips to defeat them.

We've just launched our first Personal Impact Portfolio (PIP). We've given everybody in the team a unique PIP to remind them of the impact they have through their work at Nice and Serious. It's a little experiment to help us communicate our purpose to the team.

Most Brits aren’t comfortable talking about sex. Which is why our ears perked up when The Wellcome Trust approached us with a rather unusual challenge - to design and build a website that would bring to life statistics about Britain's sexual habits. In this article we explore how we approached it and what we learned.

The creative industry has a big equality problem. We asked ourselves what we could do to change things. It started with a survey of nearly 300 people in the creative industry. And from that Nice and Equal was born.

Businesses are talking about their Net Zero targets like it's common knowledge, but does the average person really know what they're talking about?