Andela  ·  Brand & Systems Design

Two design
problems.
One
system logic.

Art Director & Design Systems Lead
Brand System, Design Strategy & Product Design
Markets unified
$100M+
Series D Raised
40+
Markets Unified Under One Brand System
28%
Increase in Qualified Engineer Applications

Overview

When Your Market
Is Everywhere

Andela operates at a unique intersection: businesses outsourcing engineering needs, and engineers from rigorous bootcamp graduates to senior level talent looking to place their skills globally. One brand had to speak credibly to both without flattening either.

Add to that a global footprint spanning Lagos, Nairobi, and New York, and the real problem becomes clear: how do you build a brand that travels across cultural contexts without losing meaning in any of them?

Brand System

Shades of
Brilliance

Before any visual work began, I mapped the brand architecture: positioning, system components, market rollout strategy. That foundation determined whether the system would scale or stall the moment it hit a new region.

I directed the full brand refresh covering creative direction, system architecture, and stakeholder alignment across a cross-functional team of six spanning brand designers, content designers, UX practitioners, and production leads across a global span ensuring consistency across every market.

The refresh touched everything. Color, typography, tone of voice, illustration, and photography were all anchored to Andela’s core mission of connecting brilliance to opportunity.

The naming gave the palette its own language. Colors like Talented Teal, Mighty Magenta, and Luminous Lime captured the energy and range of the people the brand represents. Illustrations used hue variation for depth. Photography put real people in real locations. Graphic elements activated headlines and anchored imagery rather than decorating the page.

Color Architecture

A personality-driven palette that modernized Andela’s brand and gave regional teams a consistent, deployable foundation.

Illustration Language

A scalable system built on intentional hue variation — expressive enough to feel human, systematic enough to localize.

Photography Library

On-site shoots across Nigeria and Kenya — replacing stock imagery with authentic representation from real communities.

Marketing Site

Redesigned to communicate universal connection and convert senior engineering talent into applicants at global scale.

Andela Illustration System

Content Strategy

Creating the
Ecosystem

The brand system needed proof of range. I built a campaign around a single client case study — one story told three ways, each built for a different moment in the consideration journey. A launch video for awareness, a landing page for context, and a downloadable ebook for the leaders ready to go deeper. Enterprise engineering leaders and CTOs don't respond to broad strokes so every asset was built to be specific, credible, and consistent with the same system logic governing everything else Andela put in market.

Andela Content Ecosystem

Website Redesign

Credibility Doesn’t
Translate Itself

The site had to serve two distinct audiences simultaneously: clients evaluating whether to trust Andela with their engineering pipeline, and engineers deciding whether Andela was worth their ambition.

For clients that meant surfacing credibility fast — what Andela does, who they work with, and why the talent quality holds. The site functioned as the top of the sales funnel: converting skepticism into a conversation, and a conversation into a contract. Every content decision was made with that conversion path in mind.

For engineers it meant communicating opportunity, rigor, and growth. A place that takes their career as seriously as they do. That audience required a different funnel entirely — one built on aspiration and trust rather than ROI and capability proof.

Two audiences, two conversion goals, one cohesive system.

Andela Website Redesign

Outcomes

Results across
both workstreams

The rebrand and analytics platform delivered measurable impact across both the talent acquisition and client retention workstreams — validating the unified system logic that underpinned the entire engagement.

Series D raised

$100M+

Brand system contributed directly to investor confidence and market readiness.

Talent pipeline reached

100K+

Applicants screened across Africa — the pipeline the brand was built to make legible at enterprise scale.

Market opportunity addressed

1.4M

Unfilled software jobs — the core problem anchoring every campaign and sales asset in the system.

Andela Generation Announcement

Leading a Global Team

The coordination challenge was as significant as the design challenge

Across both workstreams, I directed a team of 6 — brand designers, UX practitioners, illustrators, and production leads operating across Lagos, Nairobi, and New York. I owned the creative brief, design system governance, cross-functional stakeholder alignment, and final quality review across every deliverable.

Keeping a distributed team aligned on system standards, managing creative review across time zones, and ensuring business strategy translated into coherent design decisions at every level — that's the work that made the system actually deployable at scale.

What I built wasn't just a brand or a dashboard. It was a design infrastructure that a global organization could operate, extend, and trust.