Obasola Akintola opened his talk with an instruction. Close your eyes and picture an African brand. Then he asked the Lagos crowd what they saw, according to slides he shared, he took the audience on a journey of creating Afrocentric brand experience.
That one exercise set the tone for the Untitled Designers Conference 2026, the event’s fifth year. The conference ran October 16 and 17 at Regal Hall in Ikeja under the theme “Human by Design.” A private mixer for speakers, sponsors and partners opened Friday. The main programme followed on Saturday, October 17.
Obasola Akintola Takes Aim at African Design Clichés
Akintola, a senior brand designer at Chowdeck, titled his session “African Visual Identity, Beyond the Obvious.” He told his LinkedIn audience that designers have moved past kente patterns and the usual clichés. They are, he wrote, finally owning their visual language on their own terms.
The deck practised what it preached. Photos from the stage show slides in loud yellow, orange and violet. Pidgin one-liners sit beside a declared love for Helvetica and for roasted corn. It looked like Lagos, not like a stock-photo idea of Africa.
Attendees asked for the slides afterwards, and Akintola published the full deck for download. That generosity is rare at industry events, where decks often vanish once the applause fades.
Why the Kente Question Matters
His target is worth pausing on. Kente is a Ghanaian textile tradition, yet it has become global shorthand for the whole continent. Brands reach for it because it reads instantly as “African” to outsiders.
That shortcut flattens 54 countries into one pattern. A Nigerian designer pushing for specificity is making a commercial argument as much as an aesthetic one. Local audiences notice when a brand speaks in borrowed symbols.
Chowdeck Puts Its Design Bench on Stage
Akintola was one of three Chowdeck speakers. Product designer Rue Douglas and head of product Ted Oladele also spoke, alongside the other speakers on a lineup TechMoonshot previewed before the event. Their employer is pivoting from meal delivery into quick commerce, where brand trust shapes every repeat order.
Akintola’s slides describe him as leading design on Chowdeck’s brand and marketing team. In a market this crowded, that job decides how a company feels before anyone opens the app.
Marvis Ighedosa Retraces How Untitled Designers Began
Marvis Ighedosa, co-founder and director of Untitled Designers, also took the audience through the journey of starting the community and the challenges that came with it.
The story begins small. Ighedosa, James Moses and Chukwuka Ezeoke founded Untitled Designers in 2022 with $1,000 and a three-member volunteer board, according to the organisation’s site. The first conference took place in Lagos. Events followed in Port Harcourt, Ghana, Abuja and Enugu.
Hearing that story from a founder, on the stage the community built, gave the day a full-circle moment.
A Conference That Keeps Growing
The numbers explain why the stage keeps attracting working designers. Untitled Designers now describes itself as a federation of chapters with more than 5,000 members across six countries, according to its site. Organisers put Lagos attendance at more than 3,000.
This year’s programme ran four tracks, from AI-assisted craft to running a studio in Nigeria. The UDC Design Challenge, billed as the marquee attraction, offered ₦500,000 and three months of mentorship with a senior creative director.
Five years in, the growth is visible across editions. TechMoonshot covered the 2024 Beyond the Canvas edition and last year’s AI-centred UDC25. The 2026 theme turned the conversation from tools back to people.
What Comes After the Applause
Good conferences leave energy behind. Great ones convert it into work. The harder test for UDC 2026 starts now.
Will Nigerian brands give local designers the briefs and budgets that Akintola’s talk argued they deserve? Will the chapters in Port Harcourt, Abuja, Enugu and Ghana get stages as strong as Lagos? And will free resources, like his deck, become a habit across the circuit?
The design calendar is filling fast. Think UX 2026 is already pitching its own Lagos edition on design in the age of AI. More events mean more chances for ideas to travel, but only if they reach the people commissioning the work.
For now, the room got what it came for. A Lagos crowd closed its eyes, pictured an African brand and heard a designer insist the picture should look a lot more like home. TechMoonshot, a media partner for the third consecutive year, will keep following where the Untitled Designers Conference 2026 conversation goes next.
