Growing up in Nigeria between the late '90s and early 2000s meant you had a front-row seat to what was, in hindsight, the nation's golden age of advertising — in iMax. I'm sure you can feel the nostalgia as you recall the TV commercials that shaped that era: the Baba Blues, MTN's Saka, Milo's clap jingles, even Peak's Papilo.
This wasn't just about television. Nigeria's advertising golden age was vibrant and all-encompassing. It included the magazines stacked under our uncles' coffee tables, the pages of dad's newspapers, the catchy radio jingles that played on our way to school. Advertising was everywhere, and there was no way you would have missed this period, by choice or otherwise. Every corporate business (from new-age banks to FMCGs and Telco giants) wanted the nation's attention. And the advertising industry held the keys to it.
In summary, we could say that advertising made its big break into corporate Nigeria. Design, on the other hand, either missed its debut, or has yet to experience its miracle decade.
To understand what Nigeria might have missed, consider how design found its footing elsewhere. In stark contrast to Nigeria, the West experienced its "golden age" for design, though it's hard to pinpoint exactly what kickstarted the domino effect.
IBM's 1956 design overhaul under Thomas J. Watson Jr. was foundational, especially because IBM at the time was a corporate colossus with about 56,000 employees and annual revenue of about $600 million. Watson Jr. engaged genius designers like Eliot Noyes and Paul Rand to launch a company-wide design program that coordinated and upgraded design across every aspect of IBM.
This initiative standardized everything from mainframe consoles to packaging under a clean modernist aesthetic, creating a "benchmark" for corporate branding. Watson Jr. famously coined the phrase "good design is good business."
The scale of IBM and its success gave design real legitimacy. When IBM declared design as core, it became a signal to an entire industry, and the corporate world at large.
Then came Apple's launch of the Macintosh in 1984. Another spark that lit up America's design golden age. Steve Jobs built Apple on the belief that design dealt with more than how things looked; it was how they worked, how they felt. Fast forward to today, and Apple is worth over $2.8 trillion. Perhaps proof that good design is good business indeed.
The influence was profound. At some point, everyone either wanted to build the next Apple or become the next Steve Jobs. That's how deep the impact ran.
Apple became the poster child for what happens when a company puts design at the center of everything.
In Nigeria, and by extension across much of the continent, design never quite had its Steve Jobs or Thomas J. Watson moment. We never had our own Apple. In fact, we still reference poster children from other markets to make the case for design in corporate strategy. While this is an inspiring attempt, it doesn't speak our language or navigate our own corporate realities. Hence the struggle for design to break into corporate Nigeria.
This would have remained the status quo indefinitely. But Nigerian technology industry’s boom between 2014 and now changed everything. The rise of digital products, where good UX was more or less a minimum precondition, created a sudden demand for design talent. Without that shift, who knows? In some alternate reality, many of us might still be stuck in printing shops in Shomolu, or chasing dreams of moving abroad just to build a fulfilling career in design.
But here's the thing. Tech, for all its promise, is still just a small chapter in a much larger book. And if design stays boxed inside it, maybe the sky does have a limit. That's the risk. That we may become complacent, mistaking current momentum for arrival.
The Path Forward
Design needs to break out and find its way into the mainstream, into the places that actually shape culture and commerce at scale. Think about how advertising conquered Nigeria's golden era, from the late '90s into the 2000s, when it did more than enter the market. It basically owned it.
But this transformation is easier written than it is actionable, and the reasons run deeper than most people realize.
At the heart of this challenge lies a generational tension that defines this moment. On one side, we have an older generation that still holds the lion's share of Nigeria's wealth, power, and decision-making positions. On the other, a younger generation building with completely different tools, mindsets, and values.
While generational shifts are nothing new, what's happening now is fundamentally different. The transition from our grandparents to our parents, while not without its struggles, still allowed for a smoother transmission of values. There was more cultural continuity—religion, education, hierarchy, family structures. Even when they clashed, they largely spoke the same language.
But between our parents' generation and ours, the gap is far wider and much harder to bridge. We were raised in a world shaped by the internet, by globalization, and access to a thousand ways of thinking all at once. We inherited worldviews from places we've never been. We questioned things they took as fact. Our work, our aspirations, even our definition of success, all of it feels foreign to them.
Yet, despite all this change, the values that govern corporate Nigeria today are still largely shaped by the older generation. The systems, the metrics, the tastes, they still belong to them.
Technology's gift to us was a sandbox to play in. A space to try things differently, to rethink how things could work. But the real structures, the institutions, the industries and the larger economy all remain outside that sandbox.
This is the crux of the challenge. If design is to truly shape the world around us, it must find it's way out of our screens, and find its footing outside of the tech sandbox. It needs to do what advertising did in Nigeria's golden age. It must break through, wield power and speak its language. Design must prove its worth at scale in our own clime.
We must advance beyond questioning whether Nigerian design missed its golden age. We must now ask whether we can still create one.
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