….Deception, brilliance, illusion, misdirection, storytelling, and attention management are some of the characteristics that have been attributed to magicians in times past, but the one thing we know is “we will never get tired of seeing them”
I am still a designer only in my head. I have installed and uninstalled Photoshop several times but the best I have done with it is a small photo manipulation I did for one of my pastor’s sermon on his blog HERE. So it is with a keen sense of interest that I prowl different design forums, and it was while I was on one such group “Naija Graphic Designers”, that the idea of the series came up.
Every week on NGD I am amused and intrigued by the designs I see, some of them are so bad I want to start designing immediately while some are so good that I give a small bow for the designer.
I have had the opportunity to be a “positive pain in the neck” of some really great designers. From my time at iROKO where I worked with Fegiestouch and Insfire, to my present time at Konga where I work with Babajide, Rulz and Evans Akanno.
These guys get to hear words like “can the smiley fly”, “Can you achieve heaven with 7 colours” and many other crazy ideas that come from my ever creative brain, but the one thing we can all agree is that creative briefs bring out the best in a great designer.
For a chance to win 1million naira, Multi Choice put forward a creative brief that may have been one of the most challenging that most of these designers have ever faced, and their reactions on NGD definitely reflected this. The key elements of the brief were;
“Incorporate the MultiChoice logo and colours into the designs they are submitting for the competition. Design entries must reflect the fact that MultiChoice is a proudly Nigerian company with Pan-African roots. Competing logos must reflect MultiChoice’s commitment to family entertainment since the company’s debut in the country two decades ago”
WOW! A friend commented after reading the brief “this is a job for the gods”. Yox, one of magicians on NGD initiated a conversation on the group to get people’s thoughts early on about the creative brief, and everyone expressed their displeasure at the abstract nature of the brief.
Fast-forward to a few days after the competition deadline, and I see magic everywhere, people were able to put their creative caps on to develop distinct interpretations of what Multichoice asked for, and while the ogas at the top at Multichoice will probably surprise us all with their final choice, I have a one line message to the magicians/designers in Nigeria and around the world;
“Thank you for bringing the designs we could only imagine to life”
Also a quick message to the designers at Konga, Babajide, Rulz, Evans Akanno and kazeem, thank you for bringing my design concepts to life, I can confidently tell you that the concepts are going to get wilder and crazier but I know one thing, we will create genius together
Here are some of the logos from the multichoice competition I have seen so far and particularly like, I will be adding more as they come in.
