It’s nearly 2022; How did we get here?
Welcome back, this is another reflective piece, just me sitting down to record a stream of thoughts. At the time of writing, I’ve just completed my last ‘working’ day of the year and a good friend of mine reminded me just how much has happened this year.
Now for context, I want to point out that I am not insensitive to the occurrences of the year gone, but this writing will be focused on the highly positive and productive 12 months that paralleled this ongoing pandemic.
At a super high level this year I’ve grown, it’s felt like a plane taking off. Spiritually, I’m in a completely different space, I can’t quantify it but I’m grateful for my faith through it all. My mental fitness has taken a hit especially in the early part of the year, February through April felt tough, thankfully there are some really amazing people that have been my rocks this year, I appreciate them more than they’ll ever know. Professionally? I’ve never experienced anything like it, in 2021 I became a D&AD award-winning designer via a New York-based agency whilst studying at uni and then joined AKQA. So how did we get here?
I began the year with intentionality. I had a pretty clear sense of things that I wanted to see and gave myself the authority to start executing it. This began with me challenging Polestar’s statement of being ‘powered by Google’. A comment that I felt to be premature this side of autonomous vehicles, but which led me to write a dissertation on the salience of user experience within automotive design. This in turn spurred on multiple case studies exploring the future of automotive interfaces.
You’ll notice that generally in my practice just running with an idea and exhausting it, is very common.
I then found myself in a very, very interesting situation. If you’ve been following me and/or my work for any length of time, you maybe be aware that I’m obsessed with music. An obsession that translates into an extremely healthy relationship with Spotify. Fortunately, there were a few people in positions to hire that had also come across my explorations surrounding Spotify and at the beginning of my final year I joined Huge, Brooklyn to help design the first ever Spotify Wrapped experience for advertisers. An actual dream, I’m working with Spotify and the agency was based in New York? As in Eastern-standard time New York?! Any chance of a work-life balance went out of the window, but only for a season. The fruits of this were beyond what I could imagine, by the summertime the design award season had started and I found myself on the receiving end of D&AD Wood Pencil 2021 award. This journey continue right through to the end of June, working two/three days a week building out solutions for ads.spotify.com, Spotify changed life. I think back at more time fondly I just learnt how to get involved, how to adapt to the job and most importantly I learnt how to have and communicate a creative opinion.
Somehow in the midst of all this I had the hunger to create more work around Spotify, but in a self-directed capacity. Naturally, a student brief came in that challenged us to make Spotify’s listening experience more social: low-hanging fruit. Tahja (UAL undergrad at the time of writing) and I set out a 6-week timeframe in which to execute something we could really be proud of. I would struggle to do justice to that project within this paragraph, but some of the highlights included brainstorming with creatives across the industry from Warner Music and Vevo right through to other professionals at Huge! Along the way we decided to centre an artist, Shae Universe, and she thankfully went on to do a voice over for part of the final video. We went out and did genuine primary research to understand the general public views, all of which fed into my proudest work to date. See case study here.
I followed this with something else that was equally dear to me, exploring what it would look like if we created a scalable and profitable ecosystem around football across the continent of Africa. A hefty mission statement in any case let alone a university project. As a result it’s a concept that I haven’t made fully public yet, it looks good but the ideas are still maturing. Although yet again I found the magic to be in the process, I began exploring the storytelling before it was even finished. Determined to pull a team of talent together I shared this amongst some like-minded individuals and we set out to create the future again. Due to the pandemic we weren’t able to execute as we had imagined, and are planning to revisit in the new year. Unsatisfied I thought about how some of our ideas could scale down and what could we still do with what we had. I thought if people would still volunteer as models that was sorted, if we don’t take off the tags we could still return the clothes? Since we can’t use DSLRs will a phone camera do? And how important is it that we capture this in a studio? Do we have access to other spaces that would work? I discovered my creativity lives in parallel with my yes.
The final chapter, if you have made it this far, I appreciate you. So I finished University, graduating with first class honours and in August of the same year, 2021, I began working at the AKQA, London office. This is the biggest decision I have made to date. Now a lot of the details surrounding my work so far are still confidential, but what I can share; is that I arrived in the studio with my first client being none other than Rolls-Royce. It gets scarier. The project is to launch their first ever electric vehicle, in a way that they have never launched a car before. Swiftly after that I spearheaded the transition from a sketch-based design system to a fully optimised Figma team, rebuilding every component as a scalable component. Glad to say that’s out in the public domain now I’ve since worked across different industries with my role differing on each occasion, just in case I thought I wasn’t student anymore. I hope to continue developing as a storyteller, filmmaker, motion designer, conceptual thinker and most of all I can’t wait to become a professional designer.
So as I close this writing I’m aware it’s nearly 2022; how did we get here? Better still where are we going? Questions for another time. This has been a crazy journey and I have a feeling that there is more to come. I got here by knocking on the door and seeing if it was open, a phrase that I try to exercise everyday. Excited to see what you all make of the year ahead but until then I think that’s it, thanks and God bless.
This message comes as a sequel to this writing, I’d love to share those moments with you too.
