November 13, 2012

About the Lagos Behance Portfolio Review Day

How This All Started

Behance is a wildly popular portfolio and social network for designers and creatives. I've been posting work on there for a number of years, ever since I saw an MTV/Behance collaboration on TV in Japan. It was always a bit tangential for me, until I had a typography project of mine get featured. Then it got real. The site also started to have more Nigerian designers posting work. Through this network I met Daniel Emeka, a designer and Art Director in Lagos.

Attending a Portfolio Review here in New York had crossed my mind a few times, but it can be a bit daunting to see Meetups with hundreds of people attending. I knew Daniel was hosting a Portfolio Review in Lagos, and it just so happened I was going to be there for Maker Faire Africa at the same time. I reached out to him.

The Discovery of a Community

What was the digital scene like in Nigeria? What kind of work was being created? I wanted to find out. The design scene in New York, while very vibrant, seems at times to be very myopic, and I wanted to see what links could be forged with a community that was not yet on the global design radar.

The portfolio review itself went smoothly, despite starting a bit late. We looked at the work of Karo Akpokiere, myself, and the other designers who brought work. People showed advertising, illustration, and photomanipulation work, but no interactive design or web work.

I think this has to do with the health of print advertising vs. the newness of the web as a medium. Internet connectivity is still very troublesome there, which closes off much of the casual browsing we take for granted in the West.

The Future of Digital Design in Nigeria

It's useless to focus purely on connectivity issues in Nigeria. This will work itself out, largely because there is massive demand for broadband Internet and new software. Instead, I tended to focus on design concerns. A lot of what I saw was based on a Western visual language. Nigeria is nominally part of the West, sharing the English language and a national culture that owes much to England and the US, but there seemed to be remarkably little work that addressed Nigerian culture as a visual foundation.

I would like to see more of a truly African design emerge, one that has roots in Nigerian cities and language. That could mean tutorials done by and for Nigerian designers, teaching us how to create that "look", or explanations of how to localize iconography for the Nigerian market. I'd like to see more homegrown publications asking hard questions about style vs. substance, and challenging the community to grow.

More links can and should be forged with communities in South Africa, Ghana, and Kenya. As Africa sees a resurgence in economic confidence, the voices of the design community need to speak clearly, across the continent.

Finally, startups like Behance can play a role. They can provide an organizing platform and a model for Nigerian startups to follow. There were smiles all around when the Behance video played, partly because of the high production quality, but also because of the positive message for designers. By showing what CAN be done, and done well, Behance and others give Nigerian designers and artists a model to implement in their own communities.

My first portfolio Review was an interesting one. Not only was it in Nigeria, my home, it was more than a visual showcase- it was about a nation struggling mightily to coalesce and thrive. I was impressed by what I saw, and hope I get the chance to attend next year as well.

November 11, 2012

Onstage at FOWD NYC- A Presentation About Culture and Web Design

I had the opportunity last month to give a presentation at Future Of Web Design NYC, a large international design conference. The focus of my talk was on how to use culture when designing responsive sites, and what factors are important to consider.

As designers, we are exploring more of responsive design, but I argue that we are not creating sites that are responsive to cultural differences. My session went through factors that can affect how sites are perceived in places with different cultural norms, like Africa and Japan. I talked about how to build visual and cultural diversity into websites, and how responsive design can address these quirks of culture, language, and tradition.

You can view the slide deck here, and I will be posting a video of the presentation as soon as it becomes available.

July 27, 2012

On Mixel, creation, and sharing

This is just a quick post on a debate happening around Mixel, the collaging app from Khoi Vinh and Scott Olster. The issue is about image rights, attribution, and fair use. When mixellers use images from the web, what is their responsibility to link back to the original artist? Should a h/t be given to the source, or is the nature of the medium enough to make all image fair game? While some of this can verge on legalese, I had two general thoughts about that discussion.

There are noticeable number of mixels (mine included!)  that are only one copyrighted image and one or two minor edits. While it can be argued that this falls under fair use, I think it violates the spirit of digital image creation. If we cannot radically remix and redefine an image, I don’t believe the Mixel app is the right place to post it. Instead, things like this should remain on Tumblr or Twitter, where direct attribution can still be made.

Second, the community has made a big effort to reward Mixellers whose post count goes into the hundreds. It’s common to see Congratulations! 400 mixels! 500 mixels! and so on. While I do not doubt the sincerity and effort that goes into achieving this kind of output, I wonder if there is an unhealthy pursuit of numbers as a proxy for creativity.  This may seem unfair, and it most cases, I’m sure it is. As a visual artist, however, I would rather see fewer, more complex mixels being created (and feted).

If we are to use stuff from the web, we owe it to their original creators to reimagine what they did, and not blindly copy their work. In the long run, encouraging this kind of work will make the community stronger.

June 16, 2012

Failure to launch: 5 tips on working with deadlines as an in-house designer

Working as an in-house designer means you encounter a particular set of issues every day. I have attempted to summarize the five things that keep me on schedule. While I know I often fail to keep these principles sacred, it is important to spell them out.

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May 8, 2012

The Code Behind Pixel Fable

When I set out to design Pixel Fable, I imagined a site overflowing with content and fun stories. Then reality happened. I needed to deliver a site that told a story, not just held content. A one page site was the simplest way to do this. I wanted the user to move steadily down, discovering new illustrations and sections of the story as they scrolled.

This post describes the markup, CSS, and javascript I used to create pixel-fable.com, as well as some of the pitfalls I ran into. I will not get into the augmented reality portions of the site, as that requires a longer and more technical post.

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March 21, 2012

My Mother’s Burden

Through this whole KONY2012 episode, I cannot help but think of my mother. She was quiet, almost to a fault. She spent 30 years working in Nigeria at a leprosy settlement, with people who were cast out by their families, working with the community and the Nigerian church to heal them. The spinal cord injury association she founded in Benue State, Nigeria, is still going strong, more than 17 years after she started it. Their headquarters is named after her, something that holds deep significance for us. It survived her death, and will likely survive all of ours.

After their marriage, she and my father got their first mission posting to Apir, a small village in the middle of nowhere. This were the chaotic years after independence, and most Nigerians were still desperately poor. The small bush clinic they started in Apir is now a full-fledged hospital, my father tells me. It will also survive all of us. She never asked people to buy bracelets and posters to support her causes. Perhaps she should have, if it meant more money for the leprosy settlement and the hospital.

Perhaps my mother was an example of the white man's burden. Perhaps the era she grew up in was tinted by colonialism. Perhaps. I think it more likely that she chose Nigeria, and Nigeria chose her. The Tiv people chose her. Her publicity was in the lives she helped heal, not in how many Americans she could get to mention her. She fought in Nigeria for a stronger civil society, better access to healthcare and education, and that powerful self-respect that comes with knowledge.

Africa, my complicated womb, you need better than campaigns like this. When I think of all this, I think of my mother, and then I forget the campaign, and remember my mother.

March 10, 2012

Real democracy isn’t cheap

Real democracy isn’t cheap. Or is it?

Yeah, I’m guilty. I was in IKEA last year, and saw a poster proclaiming some wall shelf as an example of democratic design. It got me thinking about what that meant. There were a few sentences about the form or the creation being for the everyday man, and then, underneath all that, the key phrases- ‘slash costs’ and ‘low prices’. In this context, ‘democracy’ meant affordable, maybe even cheap. The price was the key.

I know that in our connected 21st century world, there are competing concepts attached to the word democracy. Lots of them revolve around getting people involved in a collaborative effort, but IKEA didn’t mean that here. Keeping resource costs down and packaging to a minimum are the only real takeaways for me. Democracy=$14.99, shipping not included.

Perhaps the marketing message is supposed to be about the benefits of co-creation and user-driven design. When we equate democracy and cheapness, though, we discount those benefits. Would it make more sense to call it an example of co-design, since that speaks to the collaborative design model they want to push?

February 25, 2012

The Value of Paper for Digital Art Directors

On February 15th, the Art Directors Club held a panel discussion with members of the ADC 91st Annual Awards Design Jury. Hosted at the Art Institute, it featured Bonnie Siegler, Sam Baron, Leo Jung, and Nicole Jacek. Much of the discussion centered around how design awards were perceived in Europe versus the US, and what the role of a designer was. To hear Nicole Jacek describe the rock-star reception she got as a designer in Europe was inspiring, to say the least.

As they talked, the conversation focused overwhelmingly on the relationship between the designer and paper. I proceed here very gently. As much as anyone, I learned to draw on paper, and I keep sketchbooks filled with doodles. The act of scribbling is cathartic. But then I thought of my actual work life, the one where I am constantly writing code and interacting directly with a computer. Is there a place in design thinking today for direct human computer interaction, or is the act of art direction limited to the analog?

I got the opportunity to ask the panel how they saw the act of writing code, and how that fit with their emphasis on paper and pencil. One panelist commented that perhaps those who wrote code saw what was technically possible, but not why, whereas the visual creator’s job was to define why, without always understanding how. Another comment in particular illustrated the analog/digital disconnect. A panelist commented that after their drawings and so on were made, the paper was passed to someone else to finish up or code up. But was that really all there was? Doesn’t the act of coding warrant more than a pass-off to someone else?

I have internalized the reasons for using paper and pencil. There are no boundaries, other than the pencil and the texture of the paper. We shouldn’t assume that computers will always remain clunky and mouse based, though. We are already seeing tablets and mobiles overtake desktops as the computers of choice. I think we need to look further than just paper, especially when it comes to designing interfaces and handling data. The role of the computer has been just a tool, and a mildly hated one at that, but things change. What method of idea generation do we offer a young designer who has grown up directly manipulating information on their tablet or computer? Do we insist on paper, even when it doesn’t lend itself to certain forms of creativity like code generation or direct HCI?

I don’t have a perfect answer, but I’m sure in the next few years others will find one. Paper will never disappear, but neither will more intuitive and complex digital interfaces. Perhaps the two can complement each other.

February 22, 2012

Hugs Keep Us Alive Print


Hugs Keep Us Alive, by Heng Swee Lim, and illustrator from Malaysia. Available on Etsy.

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