THE COLOR PALETTE WAS ON THE WALL
TAKEAWAY: Find your inspiration locally, it is all around you
A question often asked of me is how I get the inspiration to make each newspaper I design differently in its look and feel. Nothing is better to get inspired, and to connect visually, than the tour of a city, its every corner, the people, the shops, the neighborhoods. This is prerequisite for me.
In Lagos, our tour took two hours, and the landscape was quite similar everywhere, a combination of busy streets, crowded bus stops, buses carrying 50 more passengers than seats, and enterprising merchants selling everything from fish soup and sandals to haircuts out of an old telephone booth (real story: a “shop” named Quick Klip was actually a phone booth parked on the edge of the road.
But it was the end of the tour, when we visited the offices of Muhtar Barake, managing editor for our project, that I gained a perspective for how a color palette could be created.
In this office, the walls told the story: magnificently colored paintings by Nigerian artist Victor Ehikhamenor, and one of them in particular was, indeed, the color palette: the artist had drawn rectangular units, each in a different color, each more powerful than the next. I took a picture. It will serve as the basis of whatever color palette I create for the new daily .
