In 2015, Opemipo Aikomo joined the foremost Nigerian fintech company, Paystack, and went on to design the company’s user interface. He describes it as his greatest project to date, but designing isn’t the core of his creativity- writing is a skill he picked up from his mother, who is a lover of writing and books. “She used to buy Reader’s Digest, and I used to read it. It felt like traveling to me. I read a lot of Christian books because my mum was deeply religious. Writing is my original talent.” He says over a Google Meets call.
Aikomo has had an illustrious career working on design projects. He is now building Album Cover Bank; an archive that seeks to reveal the stories behind the album covers of Nigerian artists. So far, the collective has been able to collect covers from the 1950s, offering a peek into the past, and serving as a reference for the next generation of album covers.
In this conversation with The Culture Custodian, Opemipo Aikomo discusses his formative years, career at Paystack, Album Cover Bank, his design studio, Wuruwuru, and looking to find what the future holds for him.
How did you pick up designing?
I grew up in Lagos. It was pretty normal with my mum. My dad was in and out. For primary and secondary, I went to Foundation Junior school, and for secondary school, I went to Providence Heights, and then I went to Ibadan for A-Levels for three months. I thought it was going to be one year, but then I got into Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife.
I got into design at University, in my first year. Because of the three months of A-levels, I had a laptop. This was in late 2008, and then I got into Ife. The University of Ibadan was my first, and then the University of Lagos was my second choice, but then, they weren’t accepting awaiting results, so I had to go to Ife. I got admitted to study computer engineering. I bought some programming books, and I started learning how to program. One of the exercises was trying to build a login form. I enjoyed the progress of designing the form, more than I enjoyed writing the code. Now, I do both but that’s how I got into design. Essentially, I started making fun posters and started showing my friends. Things changed when through my friend I got in contact with a guy who used to throw parties for year one students. I made the posters and plaque for the party. The party was lit, and that’s how I blew. I became known as the poster guy. Organizations would reach out to me to make posters for them and I made posters for the next three years, however, it started being demanding. I wasn’t making enough money for the posters I was making, and I didn’t have the creative control I wanted.
You weren’t charging much?
I can’t accurately recall how I was charging, but it would be around N6,000 for posters. I was balling, but it wasn’t worth the effort at some point. After that, I started considering what else to do. My friend’s brother was starting a textile company, and he pitched to his brother to build a website. I made the website and we split the money, and that’s how I got into web designing. During my Industrial training at Shell, I was the only one interning at the time because it fell at the time other schools had done theirs, and so, the staff didn’t have the time for me and one other person who was also interning at the time. They left us, so I focused on practicing and improving with web design. A guy reached out to me, he would get the jobs, and I would design. I did that for a year, and we broke off because the payment was inconsistent. After that, I started looking for a job as a product designer. I tweeted about it, and the CEO of Cart.ng reached out to me, and I joined the company. On the job, I learned about software development, and after a couple of months, Lanre poached me to join his consulting company. I joined Delivery Science because I felt I had gotten to where I needed to get feedback from another designer. This was in my fifth year. I finished school and did my NYSC there. It was in Delivery Science that I got into tech fully. It was like a school, and we were challenged to learn. I worked at Delivery Science for two years, and then I moved to consulting. My friend and I ran a studio called Hello World. We did side projects for people, and one of the people we did side projects for was Shola. Shola and his then co-founder Mayowa were building Precurio; an internet office management software, and they wanted to redesign it. They brought me in with other people.
How did you join Paystack?
Sometime in July 2015, Shola reached out and informed he was building Paystack. It was a contract job and asked me to redesign the checkout page. I did the project and continued working with Shola. Ezra was at Delivery Science at the time, and they were talking about becoming co-founders, and in November when they got into Y-Combinator, I joined them on the trip to San Francisco. At the time, I was planning to leave for Norway. I had applied for an internship, but my visa was rejected
Ahan!
My visa got rejected, so I didn’t go to Norway, but thankfully, I had to go to San Francisco, and in January 2016, I resumed fully at Paystack. Paystack is my greatest project. It’s big now. It’s international and with a lot of staff, so one person can’t take credit for something that big. I pretty much built the user interface for Paystack. The brand, website, application, and everything by myself, and it has been upward from there. I hired the front-end team and the design team.
What was the transition to building Album Cover Bank?
Album Cover Bank started as a research into the story of Afrobeats, but two weeks into it, we realized that we couldn’t deeply research the genre, so we focused and niched on something we are good with, website design, curation, and archive, and settled to collect album covers, and we believed that when we are done, the story will present itself. We started collecting the covers, and we realized the covers were the stories. We found out that no platform housed the covers in one place, and so I hired researchers, and we scrapped the internet and got more than 5,000 covers. The covers came from different sites. The older covers are primarily from a site called Discogs. On every single cover, there’s a link to the source. We haven’t done any attribution. These are covers we scraped from the internet, and this was one of the critical things because we set out to collect the covers we didn’t have. We linked to the source and put out a link for a report, for those who didn’t want their covers public, so it could be taken down. It was an Airtable database, but when we got to 5,000 covers, we realized that we needed to share it with people, and the Airtable database wouldn’t work.
The studio was a space for people to learn and grow. The intern at the time, Tomiwa was trying to get into product design and web design, and this became a project for that experience. With $2,000, we hired a team and built a team that built a website that houses the database.
What were the challenges of sourcing the covers?
The interns would be in a better position to answer this, but it took a lot of time. It was manual, and there was a review process. We went through the covers individually. There was no automated way of getting the covers, and so it took time. With my software development experience, the fastest way was to build a script that essentially goes on the internet, to a bunch of sites, and scrapes them, but I wanted the interaction that the human element brings to it.
What’s the importance of Album Cover Bank?
The importance of the project is yet to be discovered, and it’s something I’m looking forward to discovering myself. What we have at the moment is an archive. I don’t think it’s being used the way it should. It’s a couple of things: reference. It gives a peek into the past. An insight into how for example King Sunny Ade designed his album covers. The utility is there, however the people who should be using it haven’t started using it. The questions are: should it be school? Should we collaborate with schools? The second is inspiration. It gives an album designer an idea about how album covers for a particular theme look like. For example, how juju covers of the past looked like. The third is an archive. The goal is for people who make covers one day to start voluntarily putting their covers on the site. These are the three utilities at the moment. The underlying part is that it’s a platform for storytelling. Every cover is a story.
The covers started from 1950, any reason behind that?
It’s more prescriptive than descriptive. We collected as many covers as we could find, and checked the date of the first one, and we stuck it with.
What have been the challenges of building Album Cover Bank?
There have been challenges, but sometimes I frame them as a natural part of doing work. There’s a lack of institutional support. The researcher is a person from the University who lacks guidance on how to go about the research. Institutional support is the biggest challenge.
When did you decide to build Wuruwuru studio?
I started Wuruwuru Studio in early October 2020. I took a N6,000,000 loan from my company and started from there. It has been successful, but success is relative. It has been successful in some regards. The projects have been done. We have applied for certain things and got in. We have some level of success, however, the possibilities are bigger than what we have done so far, and that’s why I struggle with the term success because I still very much feel in progress, and success feels final. People tend to connote success with the end, but for me, we are still pretty much at the beginning. Later this year, we will be focusing on the studio, making it more financially sustainable, developing a business model, and trying out a steady cadence of collectibles for the first time. It feels like the past four years have been about incubating the studio, later this year, I am focusing on the studio.
How did you and Daniel work on “A Feel Good” and “Hanky Panky”?
Daniel is my friend. We worked on “Hanky Panky” first. I was hanging around with a couple of friends. The “Hanky Panky” story is a slice of life. The story actually happened. Daniel likes film, and I trust his taste. When I was making the film, I needed someone to direct the film, and Daniel was the right person. He thought I was joking when I first told him. And we did. Something I have come to realize from the studio is that I started it to make my own projects.
The first two projects were my projects, and three others were for other people. Ludo with Yadi, and “E Dey Happen” with Eris. I realized that almost everyone I spoke to had an idea since they were young. Whether it’s a game, film, website, or anything at all. Every creative person had one thing they had always wanted to make. If we had good institutions for the arts, these are the things you do in two weeks, and gauge your interest in it and move on but because you have been carrying the same idea for so long, it becomes this serious thing that’s not really that serious. I have been wanting to make a book, and then I asked Daniel. He said it would be about queer stories to spotlight the lives of these people. It seemed interesting and we began to work on it. Originally, it was supposed to be a physical book. A collectible, and we sell, but along the way, we realized that as a physical book, the reach would be limited, and we changed. We made it a website, we got a few people to help, and we put it together.
The Instagram For Flowers, what’s that about?
It’s one of the earliest projects I worked on. It was early in the studio. I have always thought that the Instagram story format is good for actual stories. We use it for publishing our lives. I feel that Instagram pages are like a book. The grid is like the chapters of the book, and the stories are individual stories that kinda pull you in. I wanted to experiment with an Instagram page as a format for storytelling and then I was in the house with my friend, and the idea came to my head to make the comic. We designed it and the illustrators gave it life.
How do you tackle design blocks?
It’s not correct to say that I don’t experience creative blocks, because I’m always doing too many things at the same time. I never really have creative blocks. If I can’t figure out something, I move to the next thing, and by the time I come back, I know how to get it done. Personally, in my practice as a designer and artist, it’s about balance, and learning the difference between giving and getting.
What does the future look like for you?
I’m multifaceted, and so all of my skills are accumulated, and they all exist within me, and with everything I do, a different combination of those skills will be activated. Moving forward, I’m looking to find out.
Advice for people starting out in design
I don’t believe in generic advice. Everyone’s journey and experience are different so generic advice wouldn’t work. Ultimately, identify your driver: money, creativity, or expression. Identify it because it influences your decision. I find myself drawn to design. I learned entirely on the internet. I didn’t have mentors, and hence I wouldn’t say I’m an authority outside of my own world. If you want to be a designer, go on the internet, learn design, design stuff, show your friends, talk about it, and collaborate based on what’s available to you and your environment.
When you’re not designing, how do you spend your time?
It depends on where I am. In Lagos; indoors, browsing the internet, listening to music, occasionally visiting friends, and going out when there’s something to do. If I’m in a different city, like London, I go for walks, shows, go to the theater, and sometimes I get on the bus and get lost. I hop in and out of buses until I’m tired and then I find my way home. It depends on where I am, and who I’m with.
