22-year-old Elvis Otieno Atieno has won the Got Skillz? talent competition by East African Breweries Limited (EABL) that will culminate in a new logo for the company.
Elvis Otieno Atieno is a third-year Film and Animation student at Multimedia University in Nairobi, and he won Ksh. 1 million for the logo that he designed. The logo will now be refined into a final version, which will become the new logo for East Africa’s largest beverage company.
Elvis will also undergo mentorship at WPP-Scangroup, where he will get the opportunity to learn from some of East Africa’s most experienced creative designers. This will give him a chance to develop his skill into a career.
Elvis’ design was among the top 20 selected from 385 submissions for a hackathon last Saturday, July 20 at Nairobi Garage, the penultimate stage of the competition.
The soft-spoken designer submitted a design with barley in the iconography – barley is one of the ingredients in the manufacture alcoholic beverages. He 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. Elvis 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.
His design was picked by 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.
“It was overwhelming,” Elvis said of the call from EABL informing him of his success. “I still don’t know what to do or say but I am very happy. My friend sent me a screenshot of the competition and I just submitted my design.”
25-year-old John Kinyanjui Nyambura, and the only group that made it to the top 20, Wiptem Creators (represented by Patricia Nkirote and Teddy Sananga), came in second and third in the competition respectively. The second-placed contestant will get Ksh. 500,000 and the third-placed Ksh. 300,000.
EABL’s Got Skillz? competition was an East Africa-wide competition and submissions were sought from young creatives between the ages of 21-25, with the top 20 going to the hackathon. At the hackathon, 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.