Tesian

Shola was excited when he saw the title of our proposal: “Making room for a bigger decade”. It was the perfect way to capture the mission he had invited us on. By our next meeting, it was a different story. I'll explain. We had held several conversations with different leaders to absorb context... and we were right at work, excited to the brim about the challenge. We have a thing for high stakes based on our previous work but the nerve never fully disappears, not in a subjective field like branding. We had been introduced to the Orange team, a strategy development agency they had hired to lay the foundation for everything. I knew the co-founder, Tola Alade and he had told me about his business partner, Alessandra. A few months earlier, we had exchanged one of those “we should work together sometime” but we meant it. Now it was here, right on our laps. There was no ice to break. They had started before us but everything was still early, fluid and in motion. We studied their work-in-progress documents, and jumped on calls to hear their thinking, share our thoughts, ask questions and exchange ideas. Ale would sip from her big cup that looked straight out of Italy (I was right), as she talked us through her thought process laid out on slides and complete with “don’t take this too seriously, I just quickly put it together so you can have an idea”. We liked her immediately. Off to a great start, it all appeared. We held our own internal conversations to make sense of everything we had learned so far, from the several conversations and our study of older Paystack materials. We distilled our robust, and apparently brilliant ideas into a set of possible directions. Ready and confident, we asked for a call with the Paystack leadership. At the end of what we thought was a great presentation, they were rather shocked by a presentation that was all theory and no visualization. As a strategy-led design agency, we were used to having those thoughts-only conversations with our clients over several calls before any visuals. But fair to them, they had hired a whole agency for that. Enter Emmanuel Quartey. He unmutes his mic, starting first by giving us some feedback on the ideas, and then going on to close with something along the lines of: “guys I get you, but this is all too abstract for most of us at this point. I’m your guy here, however. I'm happy to sit fully with you at this level of abstraction. Consider me as your client in this phase. Let’s do our meetings as a smaller team and we will come to this wider meetings only at more tangible milestones.” And that’s how the combined task force was born: Emmanuel, Ale, and Wilfred Alfred, Paul Akorede, Dunsin Ayodele, Mercy Abayomi and myself from FourthCanvas. (Teslim Abu would join the project later on and Tola Alade listened in from time to time, from the Orange side). Over the weeks that followed, we met often, sometimes 3 times a week, talking through every word, line, shape, and shade. It felt like one same team. Many times we spent more than 4 hours on one call. Figma is on the Google Meet presentation from Paul’s screen, and everyone else was either right there on the file creating something or leaving comments. Someone is importing something from Adobe Illustrator to Figjam, another is uploading a sketch from paper… so we can all have it one place for all to see and discuss. Everyone is trying something, or asking what if? The sessions flowed from our own internal calls to the extended sessions with Emmanuel and many times, Ale. Working with Emmanuel was intense and exhaustive. It was both a blessing and a challenge. If you listen well to Emmanuel, you will get somewhere great, but from time to time, you'd also have to insist and defend your differing conviction. It would have to be convincing indeed however! He is everything but the surface. Emmanuel could try to nudge you for hours in one direction and when you finally start to agree, he has seen something he didn’t previously see and now he’s arguing for something you had defended and now discarded. We were not surprised by Emmanuel’s obsession, however. At least, not after our very first meeting. After Emmanuel said he was our guy in that first 'unsuccessful' meeting, we had jumped on a first call to properly get to know each other. When it was his turn to introduce himself, he had mentioned in passing, this building project he was currently pouring his soul, heart and mind into. “If you guys want to hear more about it”, we can do another call for it. Of course we want to hear more about it! We set up a call on the calendar. We must have set 60 or 90 minutes to it. We invited other members from the larger FourthCanvas team. 6 hours later, we were still going... Emmanuel had hundreds of pictures, links, and iterations to show. It was a ‘masterclass’ about soil, drainage, walls, doors, nails, bricks, hinges and everything you could see and not see about a building. We were in for a ride. We explored far and wide, but still within the crafted intentions of the would-be parent brand. From ‘rails to ambition’ to ‘exponent’ and ‘environmental modulation’, we sketched hundreds of ideas, and refined tens of them, looking for the mark that most fittingly captures the next, bigger decade of what was simply Paystack. The next time we presented to the larger group, they loved the ideas, but now they thought we had gone too far with the ideas. We had gone deep and wide, seeking the right metaphors for what they were trying to build. We had distilled several pages of strategy and made sense of them with brilliant concepts we could write books about. We had done everything but the obvious — the stack. At the beginning of the conversations, everyone tended towards TSG as the name, even though it meant ‘The Stack Group’. We had chosen to ignore the stacks idea from the elegant Paystack logo. TSG needed to have its own unique identity, we said. We had the Paystack icon on our board, with a red x crossed on it like: "don’t do it". Later in the process, it was clear this would be known more as ‘The Stack Group’ than as TSG. Now the red x on the stacks logo started to become grey. “I love these ideas but I’m also wondering: should we really ignore the obvious?”, Shola asked me one evening on iMessage. With the new spelt out name, it was increasingly necessary to consider a direction inspired by the idea of the ‘stack’, which defined the identity of the successful first child of the incoming adoptive parent. The following morning on our internal call, I was trying to give the team a download of what Shola said when Paul showed me something he came up with the previous evening. It was as if he was listening in on my conversation with Shola. He had come up with a brilliant idea that nodded just enough to the stacks without quite being the stacks. Several iterations later with additional input from Dunsin, Wilfred and I, we had a strong, compact mark that shared the appearance of layers stacked up but most importantly emphasized elevation from one level to another. At the same time, it subtly read T, S and G. (Once you see it, you can’t unsee it). It simultaneously paid homage to the origins of Paystack and illustrated the acceleration that the parent group was to be about, ultimately becoming its own striking, unique mark. In our next presentation, we began by saying it was just a work-in-progress. We were confident about the mark but we were also trying to manage expectations. We also showed other ideas that were completely unrelated to the stacks. Amandine didn’t hold back her excitement. Shola was in love! He said it made the perfect connection. “It feels Paystack without being Paystack. It feels like the more mature, institutional version of Paystack.” He continued: “I can imagine someone putting off a Paystack shirt and putting this on, and it still feels like they come from the same place.” We had created a ‘mastermark!’ It was strong, institutional and potentially timeless. We were, and still are, very excited about how much it feels like an uncle beside his niece, when you put them side by side. And this fits Orange’s family tree classification, where Paystack was that brilliant first child with accomplishments (we heard: layers) and The Stack Group was the wise uncle with global relationships who amplifies the work of the entire family (we heard: levels). The new mark was unlimited in what it could become, while signifying, or better, embodying stability, excellence and growth. “We could wake up one day and decide to make batteries. I want us to be able to go that far and wide, as long as it’s solving a problem for Africans,” Shola had said in our very first call. Now you can, I thought. Put that icon on a battery, data server, skyscraper, digital screen or as one must, a tote bag, and still it would imbue it with the daring Paystack spirit but on an entirely new level — The Stack Group. Explore the full visual system, including typography, colour, texture, devices and overall composition: 👉🏾 fourthcanvas.co/portfolio/tsg

@TheAlamu My leader 🙌🏾

Boys just dey cook dey go. Is the world ending?

@victorfatanmi Thank you so much for the privilege my boss 🙏🏾

Yes Teslim was not on the official project list but once he came in, he owned the work like he was the first on it! Incredible people I've been privileged to know, and work with.

Akóredé pushed really hard on this project with an insatiable pursuit of excellence that was inspiring for everyone else to see and emulate. I was the Director but tbh, he moved the needle the most. I'm proud of him, and so honoured to have had his total commitment on this 👏🏾

@kore_ajayi always finds a way to drag me into his projects 😅 I wasn’t part of the initial project team, but I got invited to help out with the logo animation. The work already had so much care and personality behind it, and the visual direction was clear. All I wanted to do was bring it to life. Layers and elevation (levels) stood out to me, and that became the core idea for the logo animation. Interesting work. Interesting people. So glad I got the call and was able to be part of it.

Crafting an identity for the parent group of one of the most consequential startups on the African continent requires a certain level of care. That's what @paystack came to @FourthCanvas for. That's exactly what we delivered. Explore here: 🔗fourthcanvas.co/portfolio/tsg

Durian's visual system

Stills from Durian

Easily one of my favourite projects and I get to work with the best people on this.

He too sabi 🔥

Somewhere between what I hoped for and the kind of work I get to do now with an incredible team. Feels surreal. This year’s shaping up differently… in the best way. 👨🏽‍🍳🚀

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Just landed in three new countries, can you guess where?👀

Happy Workers' Day to our amazing community 💼🌍 May your invoices be paid on time, your earnings increase, your skills cross borders, and your foreign payments arrive smoothly with Grey. Have a restful day, you deserve it 🖤

Animation so good I had to put the playback on 0.25x and watch it on repeat 👌

Save or splurge? 🧐 Is there anything you’d usually choose to save costs on while on a trip? Tell us in the comments!!!

I still remember the very first meeting we had with Shola; it began like your typical sales/discovery call. And we went with the assumption that it was for one of his projects in sports. We had only recently launched SÉON, which, in my own words, was poetry; an attempt to reimagine the age-old narrative of sports and make it unmistakably African. A few minutes into that conversation, it became clear that what we were about to be handed was perhaps one of the most consequential briefs... not just for us, but for what it represented for the entire ecosystem. There’s a particular heaviness you can only experience when your body recruits only the exact fibers needed for the weight anticipated, and then meets something that tears straight through that preparation. That's what I believe happened to us on that call. As he spoke, I reached for my notebook, uncapped my pen, and wrote four words: Making Room for a Bigger Decade Those words would go on to open the sales proposal and became our interpretation of the moment and our responsibility within it. And so, in the years to come, all that remains is to sit back and watch. To see whether we truly succeeded in making room for that bigger decade. Read the full case study here 👇🏽 fourthcanvas.co/portfolio/tsg

@__bouge__ very ridiculus

@HeyTesian plus popcorn and drink was 8k plus sharwarma and drink…10k 18k is ridiculous

ahhh ahhnn It was 6k here o