Design and Nigeria

Only a few things piss me off as much as the lack of design sense among Nigerians.

I love designing,pixel perfection, seeing stuff look good, and so I started (graphic) designing four years ago as a hobby, using popular inspiration sites for guidance and reviewing my ability. With time, I became a design critic and gave comments on every poster, jpeg, and png I could find, and the ones everywhere in school didn’t just get my blessings. I had new-found exposure to designing — to art. I had better standards. Interestingly, when I asked passers-by and friends for their opinions on these (terrible) designs, a lot of them gave positive reviews. And even when the designs were a canvas of ill-matching colors or twelve very different font families, a lot of people still thought they looked good.

Interestingly, when I asked passers-by and friends for their opinions on these designs, a lot of them gave positive reviews.

Fast-forward to September of 2012 and I was learning to be an “Interface Designer”. For months, I self-trained and gradually evolved into an interface designer from a graphics guy. Nothing has changed, except I’m better at this, I enjoy it more and it feels good that your work is being used everyday. I still scour the internet as I used to everyday for standards, for inspiration, for new stuff. There’s crazy foreign stuff online, and Nigerian design standards still suck. I check most web links I see. I like to see what effort they put into designing their products — apps, micro-sites, websites, blogs. Most of them are shit. Terribly designed. Even corporate websites are a mess, many of them.

Unfortunately, it seems it’s all acceptable. Like people don’t mind, oblivious to the state of the designs and alternately seeing them as ‘good work’. I’ve worked for clients who have refused progressive clean design for poorer designs. I’ve seen a lot of terribly designed apps, even with the new trend of lazy designing as ‘flat design’. Worse even, I’ve seen corporate websites pale in comparison to their foreign counterparts e.g KFC NG / KFC.

Co-creation hub websites and apps and a couple of new web services like Prowork have brought in a new wave of good design to Nigeria, mostly flat as to comply with the ubiquitous design trend. And I’m seeing more and more programmers wanting to smooth out the edges of their app designs. Appreciation is a whole different issue. I just wonder if Nigerians will ever come to appreciate great web designing. I want to be sure it’s worth it to put the extra effort from good to great in.