Framing the story
With this project, we had to give a community that has been raising African visual artists since 2017 a brand as strong as its work. The core belief that ties everything together. You don’t have to leave home to be seen.
The brief
Tell That Story brings photographers, filmmakers and visual artists together in Benin City. A grant with FUJIFILM, a yearly conference called EXPOSED!, monthly screenings, workshops and books. More than 2,500 artists have come through it since 2017.
Babawale Obayanju, the founder, came to us for a new website. The old one was a WordPress site that showed the work and said little about why the community exists. The site was the request. Under it was a brand that had not kept up with what the community had become.
The plan
Before any design, Wale worked through the Brand OS. A lot of what came out of it ended up in the copy and the design. The line the brand is built on came from there: talent is everywhere, access is not.
African visual artists have the eye and the stories. What they lack is the people, the knowledge and the rooms that turn talent into a career, and most paths ask them to leave to find them. Tell That Story treats home as the place to rise from. The brand had to hold that belief, and work wherever the community shows up, from an artists’ meetup to a funder’s report.
This is a comprehensive- “make one seat down and one think session” in an interactive no pressure atmosphere. You will just realize that it is important work that every company or individual brand needs to undergo. Thank you for setting this up and showing what is possible when you deploy the right knowledge and tools. We are better by this.
The work
Tell That Story is rooted in photography, so we broke the old closed frame open into four viewfinder corners, with the name sitting inside like a shot being lined up. It stays open on purpose. A photograph only ever captures part of reality, never all of it, and the gap leaves room for conversation and for life to come in.
Tell is written in script because it is an action, and the action can change. There are many ways to work with a story, so each programme gets its own verb: fund, screen, read, frame, shoot. That makes it a brand in motion.
The frame comes in two versions. The ruled one is for sponsors and formal organisations. The hand-drawn one is for talking with creatives.
Red and orange were the original colours. We kept the orange and made it stronger, against black and paper, and no more than those three. Tight condensed headlines give the brand the feel of a newspaper, which suits a community that reports on its own world. The verbs are set in TTS Tell Script, a hand script we drew for the brand.
From there we built it out. We moved all their content across to the new website and gave the team the ability to edit everything themselves. We made animations for the launch, the stationery, the merchandise, and an edition of the brand for EXPOSED! 2026, their yearly conference.
The results
Tell That Story has relaunched with a refreshed look and feel and an invigorated sense of purpose. The team can now run and manage their website and push the brand themselves.