I took a flight all the way from Uyo to Lagos for one thing ⏤ to attend Untitled Design Conference 2023 (or UDC) from 12-13 May.
Untitled Design Conference (UDC) is a creative design conference for designers, artists, developers, managers, and builders. And it gives young techies and creatives an incredible opportunity to network and learn from like-minded innovators from Lagos to the world.
I first came across the event on Twitter from Shalom and I immediately invited my friend Mary to attend it with me, because ey, Mary is forever a great friend to attend events with and she’s also an incredible UX/UI designer.
These days I attend events for the following reasons:
- To learn from people
- To speak and share my insights
- To see how others organise their events and check out their event comms (I currently lead global communications for the Social Enterprise World Forum and my entire year is spent building and implementing communication strategies for different events + the annual World Forum)
- To take a break from work and experience something new
- To network
For UDC, it was more of a curiosity to attend an event for designers, check out their event planning and experience something new for me. The programme was a 2-day event and I flew in on the first day of the event.
The first day had me quite confused with the workshop timing, things weren’t happening at the expected time, I felt exhausted and for other reasons, I left early. However, I had a better experience on the second day.
My highlights from Untitled Design Conference – UDC 2023
- A key highlight from the second day was Godwin Olatunde’s breakout session, “From Idea to Delivery: Mastering the Motion Design Process with Best Practices, Tools, and Collaboration Strategies”. I officially started illustrating and making motion designs sometime in 2022 and I’d also been following Check DC online (Godwin is a Motion Design Partner at Check DC). His session to me felt like ‘wow! These are good motion industry practices to be reminded of. ‘(Read here: 40 useful resources for motion and graphic designers and 3 ways becoming a motion designer changed my world view on the word “impossible”) So it was a good session for me.
- Get a team of committed and passionate people whenever you’re working on an event. From an observer’s perspective who wasn’t part of the volunteers and without an insider view, I think the event organisers had really good team members and volunteers. The event was large, there were a lot of people; people travelled from different states to attend the event. As they say, if you want to go far, go alone. If you want to go farther and faster, go together. Seeing this kind of event coordination was a highlight for me.
- I began GC Fund in 2021 to fund tuition fees, training programmes and sponsor tickets for young people to gain access to creative and educational events. UDC made me reflect on a lot of possibilities and future plans, especially to support young people within the creative industry.
- The food was really tasty. The queue to get food at the event was so organised, one of the best food queues I have ever seen in my life in Nigeria, yet. The meals were nicely packaged, the portions were big and the meat inside was another thing! BIG. They really took care of their attendees and I love to see that.
- I got a white merch courtesy of James! who’s one of the conveners of UDC.
- I met some designers I’d been following on Twitter, but never met in real life. Special shoutout to Feranmi Oladepo.
Organising events of this magnitude with speakers of this calibre is never easy. And this was impressive. In my opinion, events like this are really necessary and important for the creative industry and for young and upcoming designers. Building and growing in silos is never advisable.
You can check out my video highlight from UDC 2023 below.
