Meet DZISAN, a world-class Brand Designer who focuses on minimal designs.

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Tell us about your journey as a designer and what inspired you to pursue a career in design?

Designing has always been an innate ability for me since birth. I was always known as the class artist. I remember using Coreldraw to draw and print ‘Pikachu’ in primary 3, I was eight (8) at the time. This theme continued, I drew and sold my first comic book - ‘Daywalker’ for N200 in my second year of junior secondary education. When I got to the university, my roommate introduced me to Photoshop and I never looked back since then. It easily became a great way for me to make money.As for what inspired me to pursue a career in design, It is an innate disdain for bad design. I felt I needed to do something, to fix it.

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How do you balance creativity and practicality in your design work?

Minimalism is a theme that runs through my portfolio. I feel if you try to keep things simple, you’d easily achieve a balance of creativity and practicality in design, this is good design. I try to do it ‘The Apple way’.

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How do you approach designing for diverse audiences and ensure inclusivity in your work?

If you zoom out far enough, you’d see our world as one blue dot - No complexities. On the contrary, If you zoom in on any one element, you run the risk of overemphasizing that element and neglecting hundreds, thousands or even millions more.

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Can you talk about a design challenge you faced and how you overcame it?

No particular one comes to mind but ’Time heals all wounds’ - same thing applies to design challenges. Just give it time, relax, calm down and recalibrate.

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How does collaboration play in your design process and how do you work with other team members to bring a project to life?

I see collaboration in design as one’s willingness to accommodate the design preferences of others, which isn’t easy in my opinion. However my favourite approach to collaboration is more like teamwork - whereby, I’m able to recognize the unique strengths of others and introduce these strengths to enhance a project.

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Share a design project that pushed your skills and helped you grow as a designer?

Several years back as a burgeoning designer in the UK, I had designed and delivered some collaterals to a client. A couple of weeks later they needed to apply the designs on some T-Shirts, then the printers signaled that the files I sent weren’t usable, instead what they needed were vector file formats of the designs. I had created the designs using Photoshop, as I wasn’t conversant with Illustrator then. I wasn’t ready to come off as unprofessional. That event pushed me to learn Illustrator and deliver on the job.

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How do you measure the impact of your design work and gauge its success?

I consider my work to be successful and impactful when clients are able to apply design assets effectively and have third party customers interact positively with the roll out. On Instagram for example, going to my clients’ pages and seeing positive feedback on their implemented roll out, is always gratifying.

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Can you talk about a design project that you’re particularly proud of and why?

I’ll answer this a little differently. It’s always a humbling experience when you’re approached by the shot-callers, behind some of the big brand names. Being a designer is such a unique position because you often get to interface directly with the CEO’s, Directors, Managers one-on-one.

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What’s your advice to people that want to start a career in design?

You’ll need to be passionate about it. Ask clients for a commitment fee and then keep a to-do list.

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If you had to start design all over, what would you do differently?

I really do not know. I rarely dwell on the past, I live in the moment - carpe diem, and mostly think of what next.

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Want to see some of Dzisan's work or just connect with him? Follow him on Instagram here.

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