Lola Adewuya
Lola is a multidisciplinary creative currently based in Atlanta, GA. She uses her educational background in Sociology and professional experience in strategic design to solve sociocultural problems.
Her work focuses on designing tools, systems, and spaces that show us how to think outside of the box, bring out the best in ourselves, and take better care of each other.
As a brand strategist and designer, she works with companies that are inspiring meaningful cultural shifts, helping them harmonize messy action with structure and strategy. In the past 5 years as a freelance brand developer, in-house marketing manager, and agency owner, Lola has worked with teams of all sizes to bring their visionary ideas into the world.
Multidisciplinary creative focused on designing tools, systems, spaces that lead to meaningful cultural shifts
Latest inspirations?
Finding interior designers creating immersive spaces - gulm interiors, soft curved furniture
Hannah Traore - art curator, creative life / Nana Agyemang - stylish creative
Other agencies - Willa creative, women led, high quality design styles, modern brands
Most surreal project?
Working with Balanced Black Girl to manage her social media - feeling like it was a culmination of my continuous work and a focus on women in the Black community to partner with a ubiquitous community, a testament to my investment. “Wow, this is a lot of years in the making.”
Consulting firm social impact orgs - biggest $ project, proud of negotiating and charging enough to be worth it, focusing on big clients
When are you most inspired?
Seeing a problem and wanting to fix it, asking why this is the way it is, generating ideas.
Getting off a call, seeing an exciting inquiry with a client’s problem that needs solving, wanting to work on it immediately
Creative habits?
Going to coffee shops for a change of scenery to get ideas flowing
Don’t like drafts - deletes everything and starts over, don’t like to build on files
What is your creative process?
Ongoing - doesn’t start when a project starts, continuously collecting inspiration and reading to draw on it for a specific project
When a project starts, no doubt inspired by whatever was seen this week regardless of strategy, feeeling in tune with what’s the latest in the world
Apply structure, build out framework, presentation slides, outline
Fill stuff in, things get loose and crazy - moments to mess around in Illustrator, allow my brain to go a little bit more freely to design
Where/how do you do your best work?
In my bed or desk or coffee shop, ambiance over location.... has to be warm and cozy, moderately quiet / background music!
What are the challenges in your creative process?
Working with clients, competing interest in visions, subjective and negotiating
Their tastes push you out of your personal creative genius, when a client wants something and it’s limited by current skills, I have to go out and learn how to do something, doing it at 20% of what someone else specializes in (certain design/graphic style)
If you could change one thing about your creative process, what would it be?
Don’t like making logos and icons as you imbue so much meaning into them through shapes and symbolizing, don’t have the patience
Wish my work wasn’t so digital, strains your entire body
Would love to Describe what I want to create and a tool creates it for me, allowing me to spend less time on computers
What are you struggling with?
Pre-creation challenges
It’s hard to control, if I’m not getting the inspiration it’ll take longer
Meeting deadlines while having this process
Changing the algorithm of your life - when I get a new client, you start searching stuff and the algorithm will change, will start pushing keywords into my feeds to get that content
“Put out the energy, start seeing stuff”
Trending content for social media content, being in their feeds
Tiktok can’t create different tabs (ie. beauty for one client that shows just that content)
Process, systems, creative voices
Will delete iterations and only show final draft
Map out your creative journey
(1) Pre-creation - 50% most time spent here “procrastination” doesn’t always look like sitting in front of a computer doing a mood board, going out and living life with the project in the back of your head, noticing patterns, constantly thinking about the project and seeing the world through the lens of the client/business, once I see something interesting / get motivation I transition to creation
(2) Creation - 20% short, execution cannot do it for 2 weeks straight, over the course of several days spending hours, faster, first concept is normally the best (stopped doing 3-4 options)
(3) Post-creation - 30% feedback and editing and reiterating, second longest period, challenge of working with clients and taking in their feedback and adjusting (sometimes unwillingly)
Favorite design tools and why?
Adobe Illustrator for logo design, accents, creating color palettes
Adobe XD is a faster, pared down version of Illustrator
Pinterest is the magic 8 ball for the mood boarding / initial inspiration phase, always collecting inspiration so the home feed is very curated, feeling like “you tell me what I should be creating today”, daily use on work to save for folders for later use
Initial creative stage, never taking a logo design and putting it on a mood board, looking at all dimensions (people of the brand, interior of the brand, typography, colors) put them into Adobe XD, annotate on images, boards
Sticky notes and journals, pen
What are your challenges with current tools?
Pinterest guides me but sometimes with a specific idea I can’t find a good reference image to illustrate it - I have the branding in my head but retroactively do the mood board
Search tool on Pinterest doesn’t capture the inspo, don’t have the vocab to describe it
Thought about Midjourney, don’t have time to learn this new tool and integrate into the process
What are some ideas for new creative tools you’d like to see?
Promising tool for mock up creation (showing clients how it looks in different scenarios, buying photoshop mockups but limited to what the mockup stores provide, hard if a client has a unique packaging bottle or color scheme) GenAI can show how it looks in a situation not limited to what people are selling
Remix mode to create mood board for you, selecting types to build out the board. Triangulate styles based on mood/feeling - perception and emotion (ie. friendly vs. sharp)
Font directory to search for characteristics based on a font brief
How do you hope to grow as a creative?
Having reliability, guaranteeing results in creative work and embracing my design style, attracting new work for my style instead of having a broad ranging attracting clients adapting to others as opposed to deep personal style