Last Saturday (24/3/2012) I was at The Network, a conference for creatives held at Chevron Club, Gbagada. It was organized by Abinibi.

These are some of the speakers at the event. (L-R;T-B)
Steve Babaeko : An art director and advertising guru.
Lemi Ghariokwu: An artist who specializes in album art. He did several album sleeves for Fela Kuti and many other musicians in the ’70s & ’80s.
Kelechi Amadi-Obi: A well known professional photographer.
Kingsley James: Founder of DigiPrints; one of the best and most well known print companies in the country.
Goke Oludare: One of the major printers based out of Ṣomolu “the printing centre of Lagos”.

Others included:
Toyosi Akerele : Founder of RISE; a youth empowerment programme who is also in the magazine industry.

Cynthia & Teju; who came from Google Nigeria to talk to us about Google+ and YouTube.

Some notes I took down at the event:
From Steve Babaeko

“Build a solid knowledge base”
“Build a solid reputation”
“Build trust; always be on time”
“Build a strong network”
“Have multiple streams of income”
Adapt to survive

from Kelechi Amadi-Obi

“Make the decision to be an artist”
“Do good work, and show it”
“Show your work with style (packaging)”
“Take your work to the right audience”
“Do more than what is paid for”
“Put your standards above that of your clients. Then they be able to tell you “use your discretion” “

Kingsley and Goke also spoke about the age old battle between graphic designers and printers, and why many printers insist on CorelDraw’s .CDR format when we like to design in Photoshop. Basically the rip of their machines come equipped to handle .CDR and .TIFF natively. Also exporting to PDF is also a good format for print. We were reminded to take note of resolution, the size of paper (or whatever material to be printed on) and to design in CMYK.

All in all it was very good and enlightening.
Kudos to Abinibi for organizing this. Look forward to there being more and attending them.

As “award season” comes to a close, Where we take a look back at the past year and pick and/or rank our favorite things, products, entertainment, etc. Here’s my attempt at recapping 2012 and the things that I enjoyed and caught my attention last year. Bear in mind that for most of the year I was away from the city and it was kinda hard to keep up but I tried. I’ll try to make this an annual thing and maybe have a more structured “top-10” type list. You can include some of your favorites in the comments too. (Also it took me veeeerryyy loooong to compile and write this post)

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Last year I created a similar list and even though I didn’t accomplish all the things on it (mostly because of NYSC), it was still a great year for me nevertheless. And I think making the list kinda helped. I had compiled this year’s since January but wanted to wait till NYSC was over to post it. To be honest, it feels like the new year starts for me once I return to Lagos. So here goes (in no particular order):

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Here goes…
Stuck indoors because of fuel subsidy protests throughout most of January.
I’m the UI designer for MyCash.
Then there’s this thing called NYSC.

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