The Story of LogoMarch
Towards the end of February, I noticed that I was going through a period of creative dryness. And so I started thinking of an exercise that would jumpstart my creativity. I have made it a habit to challenge myself as often as possible so that I never get too comfortable. This makes me do all manners of creative and non-creative challenges. Challenging myself often leads to self discovery and improvement; so I took this particular problem and made it an opportunity for growth.
I decided to do a 30 Day Logo Challenge.
The basic idea was to design 30 different logos in 30 days. Getting the idea alone got me buzzing right off the bat. I imagined all the possibilities and all the outcomes and I got excited. I shared the idea with my Design Mentor, Tola Alabi, and he thought it was a great idea. He mentioned that he knew a few designers that would like to join me in my challenge. I also spoke to a few designer friends of mine who said they would like to join me as well. And like that, my personal challenge became a community challenge.
I came up with the idea of using a WhatsApp group to manage the challenge. There, the participants will receive the brief for the day, post their designs and receive feedback.
It seemed that any designer I spoke to about the challenge showed interest in joining. A lot of designers actually said they had been looking for a platform like this and so I decided to open up the challenge. This would give every designer a chance to take part whether they joined the WhatsApp group or not.
I created an Instagram and Twitter account for publicity and a Google form for registration. Before that though, I had to think of a name. I went the lazy route and joined the two literal aspects of the challenge — Logo and March.
And so LogoMarch was born.
The next task was coming up with the fictional companies we would be designing for. I found this site called FakeClients (thanks to Product Hunt!) that generates fake briefs so people can practice Logo Design. It was a life saver! I used the site to generate 30+ days of briefs and tweaked some of them to fit our Nigerian context. I also came up with a few fictional companies on my own. I created a template for the brief image on Photoshop and we were set for the challenge to begin.
When I published the registration links on Instagram and Twitter, I expected something in the range of 15 participants. 20 at the most. When I checked on the last day in February, 38 people had registered. By the end of the first day of the challenge, that number had reached 65.
By the end of the challenge, we saw a total of 265 registered participants from six countries.
And so we began LogoMarch.
The general routine of each day was this — The participants received the brief at midnight (most nights — some nights, it wasn’t possible). Over the course of the day, the participants would post their entries. We received the most entries before 9pm as people rushed to meet the critique deadline (designers are last minute champions). At 10pm, the critique session would start. Tola Alabi and I were responsible for the critique and we would go through each of the eligible entries and leave a comment. We tried to ensure that we were objective in our critique, making use of clearly laid out criteria. At some point we invited Ayokunle Yoloye (commonly known as Yox the Professor), a veteran Logo designer, to guest critic to add variety and extra perspective during the critique session.
The quality of the logos posted on the group varied. They were a reflection of the level of skill possessed by the participants of the challenge. Since it was an open challenge some of the participants were people who had been designing for years while others were people who had just recently started designing logos. As a result, we did see some exceptional logos but most entries fell within the general “acceptable with edits” range. Occasionally we would see a truly terrible logo. Like, I-don’t-know-where-to-start-critiquing-this type of bad. Towards the end though, (thankfully) we saw less of those.
It only took a few days for the group to enter some kind of equilibrium where everyone understood how everything worked. People focused on finishing and posting the challenge of the day. Occasionally, conversations surrounding logo design and the business of design came up. Discussions around topics such as form vs. function, ethics in design and Intellectual property ownership. After these conversations, some of the members of the group attested to how they had learnt by following some of those conversations. On other occasions, people posted design job openings on the group.
The group wasn’t perfect though, there were a few times when heated back-and-forths occurred between members in the group. It was a natural thing to expect because you can’t bring a lot of people together without clashes in opinions. Sometimes I let the fires burn out naturally, other times I had to step in to remind people about the reason we were all in the group.
While things were happening on the WhatsApp Group, a lot of people were posting logos on Instagram with the hashtag #LogoMarch. It was interesting to see a whole other dimension of the challenge happening outside the WhatsApp group.
At the midpoint of the challenge, to make sure people did not get bored by the somewhat repetitive routine, and as a way of preparing the participating designers for all real world challenges, we made the participants re-brand popular Nigerian brands. Brands like NTA, Emzor Pharmaceuticals, Gala and Tantalizers were featured. It was interesting to see concept after concept re-imagining these classic identities.
At the end of the challenge, after 30 days had come and gone and the deletion of the WhatsApp group loomed closer, I began to notice how people asked that the group stay open even after the challenge finished. Others begged for the challenge to continue into April. There were suggestions for FlyerApril and UIMay. It occurred to me that this was the first local creative community that a lot of the participants had been a part of. The challenge group met a need for learning, self-improvement and collaboration within the creative space that many had not experienced before. Over the course of the 30 days, it seemed like bonds were formed, some level of synergy had been catalysed and people had become friends all while getting better at logo design.
It was moving to hear the mushy speeches from different participants on the last day of the group. I won’t lie, I was tempted to leave the group open. The potential and the possibilities of a local community like that were tremendous and for me, someone who is passionate about bringing people together to create movements and experiences, closing the group was a hard decision to make. But I made it. Because if we had left it open it would have descended into chaos.
I was unable to actually design 30 logos in 30 days which had been the original plan. Organising and facilitating the community challenge proved to be a challenge in itself. Facilitating the challenge was a bit more intense that I imagined it would be. The upside is that I got to meet amazing people. I got to be a part of an educational experience. I got to contribute to peoples creative growth and I got to learn a lot as well.
Through the daily critiquing of all those logos I became more critical of my own logos. More intentional about my concepts and presentation. I learnt that managing a community is hard. It takes time and conscious effort. It’s easy to have a vision in your head, but the real task lies in executing that vision. My role as a community manager was to create an environment where synergy could happen in a positive atmosphere of focus and respect. I also learnt the importance of community to the growth and development of an industry and the people that its made of. I learnt that most things take more time and effort than we imagine.
I learnt the importance of planning, the importance of documentation and keeping data. These simple lessons make a huge difference in my life.
I would like to end by saying Thank you to Tola Alabi, my mentor and good friend for giving so much of his time, his advice and expertise to help me and to help others. I would also like to appreciate Mr. Yox the Professor for his time, to critique work and to answer questions on the group. Lastly I would like to thank the participants who joined the WhatsApp group for their time, commitment and their data (At the end of the challenge about 1051 images had been posted to the group. Each image is at ~100kb, you do the Math).
P.S. Now that the challenge has ended, we will be doing highlights of the logos as well as sharing some of the insights, stats and other information we garnered on the LogoMarch instagram page. Follow LogoMarch on Instagram for more details.
One last thing…
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