Andela  ·  Brand & Systems Design

Two design
problems
One
system logic

Building one brand system for 40+ markets and leading a team across Lagos, Nairobi, and New York.

Art Director and Product Design Lead
Brand System, Design Strategy & Product Design
$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?

The brand launched as Andela raised a $100M+ Series D and screened 100K+ applicants across Africa.

Andela needed one brand that could win enterprise clients and attract senior engineers in every market it entered.

My Call

I chose one global system over regional versions. Markets could localize photography and language, but color, type, and illustration stayed the same everywhere. That is what let 40+ markets launch on one brand.

Brand System

Shades of
Brilliance

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

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

Color, typography, tone of voice, illustration, and photography were all anchored to Andela’s mission of connecting brilliance to opportunity. Illustrations used hue variation for depth, photography featured real people in real locations, and graphic elements anchored headlines.

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.

Two audiences, two conversion goals, one cohesive system.

For Clients

Credibility fast. What Andela does, who they work with, why the talent quality holds. Every content decision mapped to a conversion path: skepticism to conversation, conversation to contract.

For Engineers

Opportunity, rigor, growth. A different funnel entirely, built on aspiration and trust rather than ROI and capability proof.

Andela Website Redesign

Outcomes

Results across
both workstreams

The rebrand put 40+ markets on one system and raised qualified engineer applications 28%.

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.

I set one shared workflow for every market and ran post mortems after major campaigns so the team improved with each one.

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.