Creative Week 2023

Emma Rose

January 16, 2023 4 min read

January is the Monday of the months, so to make ourselves feel a little better after a week of raiding the Christmas chocolate cupboard, we decided to carry on with our Creative Week tradition we started last year 🎄

Niice is a creative product built by creative people, so Creative Week is where everyone breaks in the new year by exploring a project that’s totally unrelated to Niice. Last year the team learned about game development, product photography, web design, songwriting, and we even had a Death Clock, just in case you’re wondering what you’re expected lifespan is (you’re welcome 🫢)

Here’s what the team got up to this year…

William’s game, Dungeon Dash

It wouldn’t be Creative Week without William (one of our developers) cranking out a multiplayer game in a matter of days. The aim of Dungeon Dash is to either find the golden chest or be the last person standing by not letting your teammates push you into an infinite black hole. In good team-spirit we focused on the latter, of course.

He’s planning on adding a bunch of improvements and new features to the game and make it publicly available on webgames.lol. Follow his game development adventures on Twitter to stay in the loop.

Adele’s family history

Adele is our Team Administrator, so as a born organiser this project was right up her street. We all thought tracing her family tree was a cracking idea for Creative Week as it’s one of those things we all say we’d like to do but never dedicate time to doing it. She did a ton of online research and talked to family members and mapped it all out on My Heritage, complete with real Victorian headshots… the hairstyles back then were fascinating I must say.

Every day we looked forward to Adele’s daily standup to hear about what she found and the stories she was told (she didn’t uncover anything too suspicious, thankfully).

Paul’s personal website

Originally, Paul was going to do some woodworking for Creative week but after his wife warned him about chopping wood in the house, he thought better of it.

Instead, he focused on improving the design of his own little corner of the web (paulmcbride.com) where he talks about life musings and coding stuff. it’s been a few years since he last updated his website so he’s hoping this new design will motivate him to write more. To help, he’s built in a “mini-blog” feature where he can write a simple paragraph per month instead of a full blog entry. Smart.

Check out his code on Github and give him a follow on Mastodon.

Tom’s game, Tippy Tappy

Tom also brought a brilliant multiplayer game to the table this week. Tippy Tappy is a fast typing game that takes a paragraph quote from a film and the person to type it out the quickest with the most accuracy wins. It was absolutely hectic, you think it's going well then you look at the moving cursors and discover you're in last place. Dammit.

This game brought out the competitive streak in everyone.. What a way to show us all up for our terrible spelling and typing skills!

Emma’s macramé art

This year, Emma wanted to stay away from the computer and try something more crafty...with a few Pinterest searches she decided on a Macramé wall hanging. It's a form of textile art that involves knotting cords or strings to create patterns and designs.

She started with a few YouTube tutorials and after many hours of learning how to do the knots, she tried doing some of her own patterns and designs. It all sounds very therapeutic, which is just what you need for the dark January days.

Chris’ drone photography

Our founder, Chris, travelled to New Zealand over Christmas so there was no better project for Creative Week than capturing stunning landscapes. The footage he captured looks like something out of an ad or tourism video, and the good news is the drone is still intact (which is more than what can be said for the other two that were “lost” back home…).

When he’s not out with his drone or Fuji camera, you’ll find him on Twitter or Mastodon talking about all things branding and design (he’s a bit of a typography nerd).

That's all folks! Until next year—we're already looking forward to it.