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A true creative, Kyle Nichols loves drawing, graphic design, film, and telling a story through design. He is the type of designer architects want at their firm. Kyle’s creativity ranges from linguistics, with descriptive pairings like “fantastically absurd,” to his ability to design with a story-like, ground-up style. Kyle’s art is in composing pieces, looking at them in process, diagnosing successes and failures of design, and providing critical iteration.
Kyle found architecture as his vehicle for technical and creative talents. It was not a straight road though. Kyle dabbled in general engineering and physics before finding his “ah-ha” moment. It was a late-night adventure to the architecture building with his friend that takes responsibility for the smack-in-the-face type of realization that he was meant to be an architect. He remembers walking in for the first time and seeing student projects pinned up on the walls of the reading room in the moonlight. Soon after his revelation, Kyle found himself up all night completing a portfolio for submission to the College of Architecture + Design program. The rest is history!
One of Kyle’s favorite projects in college was designing a 3-part memorial for a mining disaster along a greenway in Briceville, Tennessee. He loves creating space for human experiences and hopes to get the opportunity to design a high poetic type of museum one day.
The Art + Architecture building was, and still is, Kyle’s favorite building on campus. It was one of the main reasons he decided to go to the University of Tennessee, even before his major was architecture. He appreciates the brutalist concrete structure, and sees the building as “a perfect vessel for everything that happens inside it.” The atrium and open studios create a rich atmosphere for creativity. The ideas covering the walls and every open space throughout the building cross-pollinate designs from studio to studio.
Years later, in true architecture student fashion, Kyle pulled an (almost) all-nighter. It started with a drink on a patio. Kyle's colleague, Eric, had offered him a position with his new architecture venture, later known as Comma Designworks. They were discussing the new company name, and Kyle was inspired by the ethos behind the comma. So inspired, in fact, that he stayed up until almost 3:00 a.m. creating a logo and wordmark for the new company. His passion and creativity contributed to Comma Designwork’s final logo and brand standards.
When Kyle is not working up designs, he can be found at the Belcourt Theatre or having a drink on a patio. His latest venture has been styling his new home in East Nashville.