I’ve spent the past couple of weeks building Looters: a public archive of Nigerian political corruption since the 1990s.
Governors, ministers, shell companies, Swiss accounts, the Jersey trusts, — one searchable graph.
You too can connect the dots: https://t.co/faIfzWfAIp
You can copy an aesthetic but you cannot copy the brand truth behind it. When your brand expressions are rooted in a truth peculiar to you, they become ownable and they resonate completely on a different level.
Always saddening whenever branding work for big African organizations gets done by European design agencies for no reason other than Western validation. Not because there are no design studios in Africa capable of great work, not because there's no budget as it’s 2x more outside.
I think a conversation that might be largely missing in tech/design is brand strategy.
A lot of people reference brands they love, I hear it all the time: ‘we want to look and feel like apple, ramp, linear, stripe’ etc etc
Those brands are good because they found the brand qualities that are true to their ethos and amplified them through design.
Too many brands try to reference others in the design process rather than take a step back and find the qualities that are true to them.
People see something brilliant and say ‘I want something like that’ rather than ‘how do I make my thing brilliant?’
That’s how you build a brand that others will be referencing in the years to come.
The J. Randle Centre for Yorùbá Culture & History is hiring a full-time Graphic Designer to help shape the visual storytelling of Yoruba culture and heritage.
If you’re a Lagos-based creative ready to build meaningful visual systems, this is worth checking out 👇🏼👇🏼
Hiring Brand Designers
5+ years of experience
Strategic thinker and a great collaborator.
You will create great visuals for marketing campaigns, events experience and digital products.
Illustration and Motion Design is a plus.
Reply with your best work.
📍Lagos