Starting again

I have been coaching designers since 2018 and one thing is a constant when you ask them, "how was it like working with Praise?"

"Ctrl + A, Del", they'll unanimously answer.

I want to explain my side of the story, because despite their gratitude, I bet they still hold grievances against me. Sigh—just kidding.

My first time was painful. It was Victor who'd ask me start over. While I can't remember the project, I can vividly remember the hurt I felt deep inside—masked by smiles and a lot of "I get".

He didn't even say it. He just pressed the keys and said "start again". It was the audacity for me, lol. I was pissed right up to the point I finished starting all over, only to see I did something better.

I lost it—the pent up anger—Victor was right when he said the last one was shit. When I showed up the new one, untitled-02.ai, he acknowledged it was better but I still started again.

While literally anyone in the Tribbe has an episode or multiple of starting all over, one sticks out really sore.

His name is Damilola Mojid. He joined us at Neptunn as a corper for a year working in Graphic Design & 3D Modelling.

August 2019, we had an engagement with Bola Lawal of ScholarX to manage the event branding for the debut edition of Acadafest—a concert aimed at raising funds to send deserving students to a tertiary institution of their choice.

Primarily, Damilola and I handled it. In retrospect, I think I wanted to see how good Dami was.

"Hey, would you handle the logo design and I'd see how we can take it from there?", I told Dami

"Okay, I'll work on it", Dami replied in his incredibly calm, low usual demeanour.

Few days later, Dami had come up with an idea.

I didn't like it. The client would definitely not like it. I needed to be able to sell it, and this just didn't cut it.

Art direction can be a b*tch 'cos you have to find the balance between projecting your preferences and actually defining a direction.

"Looks okay, but doesn't hit it yet", I said, "think we can try something a little more casual, considering it is a concert?"

"Errr", Dami's face was lost.

"Okay, let's try this", I opened a couple of tabs and curated a new moodboard, "does this give you an idea now?"

"Yeah".

2 days to presentation, I was looking forward to what Dami had in store. When he showed me, I was like "dang! My idea nor work, my guy".

I spent the next couple of hours with Dami updating the option, changing the fonts and building a new system.

"What do you think?"

"It's much better", Dami heaved a sigh of relief.

"Let's work on the deliverable ahead of the presentation. Think you can handle it today?", I asked.

"Yeah, sure"

That night, like I do all nights, I decided to sleep. It was excruciating pain when my mind began to strip down the logo Dami and I had worked on together.

At the same time, I was thinking, "how will I tell Dami all of this?"

I sighed.

Next day, as Dami walked in, "hey, 'sup, we're starting again on that logo. Don't worry much, I'll take point and you'd support so that we don't deal in back and forth", I said, "what we did went too much on the casual side".

There was this relief and shock at the same time on Dami's face.

As I write this, I almost thought, "nigga, you're a bad art director" but reverse was the case. With less than 24h to deadline, achieving any point of consensus only made sense if I took point. Yes, I lacked the necessary skills to communicate my thoughts ... but if I did nothing now, everything would go to waste.

I had a trip to Ife the same day. "I'll share the file with you for development, cool?", I said as I left the studio.

9PM, Bola sends a message asking why we'd been silent for a week. I was literally tempted to send him shots of the previous options but it was a risk I wasn't willing to take.

I started working on the new idea.

The new idea was a combination of all our thoughts minus the problems with those thoughts. 2 straight hours in and I had finished the preliminary stages of the project.

We have our logo—same direction, same concept, different execution.

It was almost 12AM. I sent the logo and the few deliverables I worked on to Dami, and also sent it to the client. We'd have to define a visual system for the event based on the logo design.

When I got back, we started work on publicity designs—posters, banners, etc. We had done so much iterations on the poster that it felt like there was no end to it.

Then there was the proposal document. When we got the draft, I sent it over to Dami to work on it. This time, he redesigned it twice. When he finally got it, I reworked the content of the proposal and made it in such a way that each recipient had a custom page tailored to their needs.

Bola didn't exactly see that coming, yet the idea came from the second time I asked Dami to start over—each time showing him what he missed in the previous option.

Over the next couple of weeks, we worked on literally hundreds of promotional materials. We were on auto-pilot now. Templates had been set, we just designed through it.

Xcheun & Adevikthur came on to support. We designed print materials for the event, sent it over for printing and bam, the day of the event was here.

Bass, Tolu, Pelumi and I were the on-site reps.

For a limited budget event, it was goooooooood!

I'd never know what would've happened if we didn't start all over. Would the client have liked it? Or would we have been so rejected that we did something worse cos of the pressure? Or would we have even lost the project?

The Acadafest project went on to land us our two highest paid projects and an engagement with Wande Coal—designing 3 of his song artworks.

So yeah, it was worth it.

I'm not saying it is absolutely easy to start all over, but the long term rewards are usually worth it if you listen to your gut.

PS: If you have questions concerning you as a designer/creative, you can send me an email as a reply to any of the newsletters and I'd reply in one of the subsequent newsletters. Making you public would be with your permission.

In the spirit of starting over, Ifeoluwa Sopeju was robbed some days ago. If you've ever lost gadgets, you'd know how this feels. While there's only so much I can do, if you want to contribute in any way, please don't hesistate to reach out to me.

You can also "send money" to him at Sopeju Ifeoluwa | 0121639722 | GTBank.

Ciao.

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