How this young creative university student won Sh1 million overnight – VIDEO
A third-year Film and Animation student at Multimedia University in Nairobi is the envy of his fellow students after he clinched the top prize of Sh1 million in a recent competition.
The 22-year-old Elvis Otieno Atieno walked home with the money and bragging rights after he emerged the winner of Got Skillz? a competition organized by East African Breweries Limited (EABL) for upcoming creative to design the company’s new logo.
The logo which Elvis designed will now be refined into a final version, which will become the corporate symbol for East Africa’s largest beverage company.
The soft-spoken designer described how a friend sent him a screenshot of the competition before he sat down and made the first design which took days.
“I remember it was the day of submission and I woke up early and decided what I had designed was not it. I made a new one and within hours it was ready and I submitted it,” said Elvis.
Elvis, who lives in Rongai with his uncle, is the first-born in a family of four. He says film and animation is his passion.
WINNING DESIGN
“I enrolled to do computers and after a month I told my uncle that, that is not what I wanted to and that I loved drawing and designing. He encouraged me to enroll at MMU where I’m in my third year now,” Elvis said during an exclusive interview with Nairobi News.
Elvis will now undergo a mentorship at WPP-Scangroup, where he will get the opportunity to learn from some of East Africa’s most experienced creative designers, giving him a chance to develop his skill into a career.
His design was among the top 20 selected from 385 submissions for a Hackathon at Nairobi Garage, the penultimate stage of the competition.
He submitted a design with barley in the iconography. Barley is one of the ingredients in the manufacture of alcoholic beverages. He then customised the font in circles to represent unity and stability and coloured it purple to represent the loyalty that alcohol consumers have to the brands they consume.
He then moved the iconography in the final logo to make it bolder and more balanced, adding the tagline “Celebrating life”.
Against the purple background, the font is in yellow, signifying the celebration of life and sunshine.
TOP SUBMISSIONS
His design won the hearts and minds of the judges because of the memorable independent device, the modern welcoming font, its clean and simple execution and its adaptability for various uses.
Elvis will in the coming days get a chance to refine his winning version, which will be EABL’s next-generation corporate logo, with the help of creatives at the regional advertising house.
He said more work would be done on the winning submission and the company will soon unveil the new logo.
The Got Skillz? competition sought submissions from young creatives – between the ages of 21-25.
The top 20 submission got into the hackathon where the contestants were taken through a presentation on the basics of logo design and then got to refine their submissions, with guidance from the judges.
Each contestant then made a presentation on their submission, from the inspiration to the colour scheme and then how it had evolved into a final submission.
Elvis says he is yet to make up his made on what to do with his winnings, but his mobile phone hasn’t stopped buzzing from congratulatory messages, with some wanting a piece of his winnings.