What happened when Lagos Met
Lagos Meet is a Lagos City Dribbble Meetup — it is an independently run offline gathering of designers. This is the second edition as I held one last year October, and I plan to run it bi-annually (April and October every year).
I really should have written about the event immediately the event was over, so I’d still remember very accurately some of the things that happened, but here it goes…
I tried to participate in the event as well as organize it, so there are some activities I experienced and some I didn’t and must’ve left out. If you came for the event, I’d appreciate if you could also do a write-up about it.
The event happened on the 7th of April at Workstation, Victoria Island (workstation has the coolest workspace in Lagos, and they’re giving a 5% discount on the weekender plan — just quote this write-up), the event started 11am on the dot and ended by 6pm instead of 5pm cos’ people didn’t want to leave.
I planned out a lot of things toward the event, some didn’t fall in place, but still the event turned out great, For clarity sake, I didn’t do it all alone, maybe most of it but I got great help from the likes of Temitope Amodu (who sadly couldn’t make it to the event cos he had a wedding), Grace, Michelle Andrade, Ronke Abiuwa of The Pearl Jacob Events (who helped out in planning and event flow for the event, she also couldn’t make it cos she had to travel out of the country), and advice from tons of people.
Basically, everything seemed to happen in the first week of April. By the way, I did a re-launch for Cokards on the 4th of April (which is meant to be her anniversary anyways) as I shut Cokards down for well over a year now trying to focus on some other interests which didn’t work out as I thought it would. But hey, we are back, better and ready for business.
I wouldn’t even lie, everything got me stressed and tired, plus I lost weight (more than the one I lost before) and I’ve been literally living off power horse and red bull for most part of the weeks preceding the event (abeg if you know anyone there help me reach out for sponsorship for the next event).
So back to what went down,
The event started with video and board games — scrabble, ludo, monopoly, playing cards, jenga, taboo, snakes and ladder, chess and other vintage amusement, it got people to team up and actually loosen up (it was a creative hangout after all, right?) people switched from game to game depending on what they term enjoyable. Personally, I think I only played jenga, and toppled the game down twice on my turn, before leaving to check in with the vendors.
Attendees also wore tags and were made to write their names and “what they can’t live without” and boy, did we see some hilarious tags, some were more practical and wrote stuff like “air”, “WIFI” and “God” while some wrote stuff like “Garri” and “Garri Ijebu” and by some I mean myself and Bolanle Banwo, the other people wrote Cake, Gala, Design and other weird stuffs. Seyi Olusanya of Da Design Studio went on to write Dami (if you know, you know). In all honesty it was quite easy to open a conversation because of the tags, as you could always question and argue why someone couldn’t live without what they said they couldn’t live without.
Henry Ikoh of Think Senpai was the event MC (basically he led the event flow), he had people team up with a partner and then draw their partners on sheet of paper; the rule was simple, draw your partner using one line, and basically without lifting your pen from the paper… but who has time for all that, everybody did their best, but some peoples best were better than others. I had Bolanle Banwo as my partner, and after seeing what she drew as me, I almost didn’t want to show her what I drew of her, cos honestly my drawing of her was a disappointment, but in my defense, I was tired and stressed, so you can’t expect me to be Picasso in such scenario. Anyways, Henry had people vote to pick the best entries and awarded gifts to the winner/s (can’t remember). We also had everyone draw 3 emoji’s you wished existed and some people came to show off, like I basically saw Collyde’s emojis and I remembered why he is Collyde Prime.
It was now time to move on to the unconference talk, it was meant to be moderated by Leslie Williams and co-moderated by Soji Oyemomi and Bolanle Banwo, but when we all peeped the crowd of people (most people didn’t even get seats as there must’ve been about 250 people in attendance) we decided to make it one large group, as against compartmentalizing the discussions. Quite a number of people gave amazing insights and sparked discussable topics like Collyde, Lexain, Bolanle, Soji, Great Ndidi, IC Parklins, Habeeb Sanni, Joshua Oluwagbemiga, Fu’ad, Aluko Segun, Seyi, and many people I can’t seem to recollect right now. The event also wasn’t just about discussions, it was also about coming up with actionable strategies and plans beyond the walls of the event. And many of what was discussed will be rolled out weeks from now.
The guys from Alpha and Jam (also supporters of the event) showcased their latest creative billboard — The Madison, which is hinged on experiential advertising, and will be fueled by kick ass creativity. They own the Largest L.E.D Screen in Nigeria (which is about the size of a plot of land) and they are also running contests with cash and engagement prizes for designers, writers and creatives to unveil their billboard in about 2 weeks from now.
After the unconference session, people took a break to network and get free cocktails provided by the amazing Lara Rawa of Eventi Cocktails, they also purchased food from partners Simply Green Juices, who gave discounts on their meals for the event attendees, After the networking break, we played a couple more games.
The first game we played was one from Figma. One year of premium subscription to their browser-based design platform to 2 designers over a game of Kahoot!, Namnso Ukpanah of Figma Design also brought loads of figma swag to distribute to the attendees of the event.
We then played a game called “What the Font” where attendees were meant to tell what font was used to write a word from looking at the appearance of that word, and let’s just say no one got everything right. The next two games that followed was called “Name the Brand” and we kinda took out key elements in a brand identity and asked the attendees to name the brand, no one also got it all right, the highest score was 18/20. All through Jemima Abu kept putting hilarious but incorrect answers to the games. The good guys at Hingees supported the event by giving out 10 rad tees and My Kolo gave out 1 Lagos Danfo Kolo and 2 Lagos Taxi Cab Kolos, which were all shared to the winners of the games and some people who could answer questions correctly about our other event supporters.
The event ended with sharing of swag items; pencils, stickers, notepads, and lapel pins from all our supporters and taking pictures with props and then doing even more networking.
Massive Thanks to Oluwadabest, Senpai, Farabale Africa, and Techcity for event coverage.
After the event, I drove home and I think I must’ve slept for like 3 days straight. If you called me and I didn’t pick, I was sleeping, e ma binu.
This was my own experience and I’d really love other people who came around to share their experience too.
You should totally check out the highlight video in the link below. Shot and Edited by Oluwadabest
Images from the event can be found here(https://goo.gl/5KrdmC) as shot by Henry Ikoh of Think Senpai
