DESIGNER SPOTLIGHT #3
Finding Purpose and Creating Value at the Intersection of Tech, Travel & Design
Shade Bakare is the founder of Nomad Digital, a digital design company that partners with creators to give them a digital makeover that is authentic to their brand. Alongside managing her business, she is also a Product Designer at Civic Actions and a travel influencer. Shade is an exceptional creative passionate about being able to live a holistically balanced life.
In her interview with us, Shade shares how she’s been able to uniquely combine her interests in travel and design, to build a brand that empowers others to create the lives they envision for themselves. Here are candid snippets of the challenges, successes, and aspirations she’s had along the way.
What is your current favorite app and why?
Let’s see…This is tough because I’m not using a lot of apps right now. But one app I do like is called Zero. I do intermittent fasting every day and it helps me manage my fasting schedule. I can easily track my history and it gives me a lot of analytics around my averages. There’s no excess information and it’s very clearly laid out with exactly what you need to know. I also think it’s beautiful and I love the color palette. The colors are very calming but also vivid.
Tell me a bit about yourself and your career journey so far.
I was born and raised in Georgia and growing up in a Nigerian home, there’s always an expectation that you’re gonna pursue Medicine or Law or something of that nature. It wasn’t until my senior year of high school, that I was able to create my own business for the first time and realize how accessible it was regardless of age. So that planted an entrepreneurial seed in me that I would then grow over time. It was also the first time I heard of someone who was really successful but wasn’t a doctor or anything I had traditionally heard of and that experience opened my eyes to realize that I didn’t necessarily need to pursue Medicine. I still ended up going to the University of Georgia and deciding to major in Biology my first year but eventually changed my major because that wasn’t the life for me. So I switched to Management Information Systems (MIS) because I still wanted to challenge myself and walk away with a tangible skill set. It was a great foundation to get because I had a lot of the Business background and knew enough about tech and Computer Science to not be scared of it.
In my senior year, I studied Fashion abroad at the University of Arts in London. It was the hardest semester I took because everything was subjective. But it was also amazing because it opened my eyes to see things differently. While abroad, I was inspired by a trip to Morocco to start a business where I partnered with groups of people around the world to curate collections of their handcrafts and increase their visibility to a more global market. I had a small team on campus and turned down all my job offers to do this full time after grad. However, I ran into a wall of burnout because at the time I really struggled with perfectionism and not knowing how to delegate responsibility which eventually became too much for me.
After graduation, I experienced a post-graduation slump because life wasn’t structured in semesters anymore, and I lost the community I had on campus. In trying to work my way out of that, I realized it would be great to start my career in consulting because it was an opportunity to learn a lot really quickly while having ownership that I might not have had in a different industry. So I worked with Accenture for about 3 years and it was a great experience overall.
When I left, I wanted to start my own thing and also find a company that was more ethos and purpose-driven. That took me about a year to establish but that’s where I am now.
What inspired you to get into design?
It really was the fact that it was a mashup of business, technology, and creative design. Inadvertently, I didn’t realize I was doing it, but my educational background perfectly touched all those points. With Management Information Systems (MIS) it was tech & business, and abroad it was design. I felt like I didn’t have to leave a part of myself because I wanted to pursue a certain career and that was really important to me.
What inspired you to combine your interest in travel with UX Design when creating Nomad Digital?
I’m really passionate about people envisioning the kind of life they desire for themselves, and then reverse engineering that to try and figure out how to make it happen. And so that’s what I did in my life. I wanted to leverage the fact that I had already built a brand around travel to create something that was bigger than me. My goal was to empower other people to not only travel, but to live a life that they’ve designed and bring the work that they do to a digital platform to have more flexibility and freedom in the lives that they live.
And what was that process of creating Nomad Digital like for you?
Some aspects of it that weren’t as difficult for me, but there were other aspects that were incredibly difficult. Initially, finding clients wasn’t hard because I was already really plugged into certain startup communities in Atlanta, and was around entrepreneurs who could leverage my skill set. It was just a matter of me structuring things in a way that was scalable which kind of leads me to the difficult part of it.
It’s one thing being in an entity like Accenture which gives you some street cred in front of clients. It’s a whole other thing to represent yourself and hope that clients trust you to do the work. And so from a mental standpoint, there’s a whole process that needs to take place to realize the value of the work that you do. For my first couple of projects, I didn’t know how to price things and undercharged for the amount of work that I did. My experience with my first client was like a crash course when it came to knowing what to specify in contracts, and boundaries to set with clients.
Even though it was really difficult at first, I’m glad I had that experience because overtime, I was able to grow accustomed to setting everything in place with regards to how I wanted to work. I now have a client management system and templates that I can leverage. Creating an experience that’s unique to you and informed by who you are is something that takes time as well. Those are the hardest parts but the most rewarding once you figure them out.
How has your travel and exposure to different cultures affected how you [approach] design?
I love traveling to places that are completely different from where I’m from. Although it can sometimes be difficult to be in those environments, they expose me to perspectives and ways of thinking that I just never conceptualized. The idea of what the moon and stars symbolize for someone who’s spent their life in the Sahara desert is completely different from mine but is also an entirely valid and beautiful perspective that’s interesting to learn from.
Travel really pushes the boundaries of one’s perspective and can inherently impact the things we design. When you’re in the same place forever, your frame of mind is centered on that place, on that predominant culture, which is limiting because we live in a very vast world with so many other ways of thinking. Travel is also a humbling experience because I’m not just seeing things from what is relevant to me, but constantly seeking to understand how it’s relevant to others and then building on that with inclusive design and accessibility.
I also enjoy being in different rooms and having the opportunity to vouch for multicultural design. I can sometimes be the only person of color in a room and it’s really important to be able to bring that perspective as well in a field that’s predominantly white male.
Working a fulltime job, running a freelance business, and being a travel influencer, how do you balance everything and know what to prioritize?
I live by my calendar, that’s for one. If it’s not on the calendar it doesn’t exist as far as I’m concerned. I’m really intentional about my morning and evening routines and I write out my top tasks for the day so I can mentally stay organized and not get distracted. I’m also really intentional about digital minimalism, so like I mentioned, I offloaded a ton of apps from my phone because they were distracting.
Part of the reason it took me a while to, get to the point where I decided I wanted to work again and find the right role, was because I was really prescriptive about what I was looking for. It had to be remote, and it had to be somewhere I felt I’d be able to balance all the other stuff I do. I now work at Civic Actions which is a very mission-based company that also values balance. It’s really important to them that people are balancing their personal, work, and spiritual commitments, and that for me was something that was really huge.
Even prior to being at the stage I am now, where I’m able to manage everything, I was intentional about what I signed up for. It was difficult because there were a lot of incredible opportunities I had to turn down because they weren’t going to align with what I wanted. In that year and a half, it was difficult to maintain the vision of what I wanted to manifest, but I kept holding on to it even with failed attempts across that journey. But I’m so thankful I didn’t because this Civic Actions is literally made for me, I believe that fully. So ensuring I’m super organized about my commitments to Civic Actions also feeds into me being organized about my commitments to my personal business.
How relevant do you think mentors and sponsors are for African designers looking to develop their craft?
Overall, I think mentorship is huge. There are different organizations and people who, if I didn’t cross paths with, I wouldn’t be where I am. You can’t be what you can’t see, you can’t reach for what you can’t see as possible. So I think it’s important from the standpoint of not making the same mistakes that other people made but being able to leverage the resources and the knowledge that they have.
I’m a firm believer in the fact that just because I had to go through this difficult journey with multiple turns, doesn’t mean that you have to. If we can make things easier for people then we should. I don’t think it moves us forward if everyone is starting at the same place. And so mentorship is huge and it’s something that I’m really passionate about doing myself as well.
While I think it’s important to have mentors, I also think it’s really important to be scrappy as an individual. The kind of person that can self teach and figure out what you need to know when you need to know it. Because like I mentioned, even though I didn’t know what UX was, it eventually came down to me being really passionate about learning more and finding any opportunity I could to work on it. Using mock projects, for instance, to showcase what you can do and having a demonstrated interest versus a verbal interest. So finding mentors is huge, but your ability to find mentors who will really back you will be even more amplified if you’ve backed yourself first.
What is your vision for the global community of African designers?
That’s a great question. I just wanna see us win! Period. I really want to work with entrepreneurs on the continent in general, to put the systems and design standards in place that allow us to be able to tell our own stories. As designers, we understand how impactful and crucial beautiful, solid, modern design is and aside from just having a solid business, we live in a world where there are options for everything. So the only thing that differentiates this option from the other, is how you present and package yourself. I’ve seen some startups and initiatives that are beautifully done and I’ve seen some where there’s an opportunity area. I want to be able to either provide thought leadership that helps to educate, or actively work with people and entrepreneurs on the ground to be able to put some respect on our businesses and the initiatives that we start.
There’s a large number of West Africans that have left the continent and I think those of us in the diaspora are in a unique position and perfectly poised to couple with people on the ground because we have both that western context as well as the context that comes from the cultures that we all connect to, and so it really is a huge goal of mine to figure out how to be able to scale that impact. For me, it starts off with being able to partner with entrepreneurs and startups to be able to figure out how that education or how that impact can be scaled.
