Independent design practice · Yaba, Lagos
Identity systems, editorial design and packaging for brands that intend to outlive the trend cycle.
Currently
Twelve months into a full rebrand of Ìlé Coffee Roasters — a Lagos roastery moving from market stalls to a flagship on Awolowo Road. Wordmark, bag system, and a 96-page origin book.
Two studio slots open for Q3 2026. Identity work only.
Drag sideways — click & hold
A roastery named for the Yoruba word for home, moving out of Balogun Market and into a permanent address. The wordmark is drawn from a single unbroken stroke — the shape a hand makes pouring water. Bags carry a hand-set origin grid: farm, altitude, process, roast date, all in the same weight so no single fact shouts.
A 128-page print quarterly on West African architecture, printed in Ibadan on uncoated stock. We rebuilt the grid around a 9-column base so photography can break the margin without the type losing its line. Issue 04 sold out its 2,000 run in eleven weeks.
Signage and a wayfinding type system for 14 bus terminals. The brief was legibility at speed, in glare, for people who may not read English first. We built a pictogram set tested with 60 commuters and a bilingual hierarchy that puts Yoruba at equal weight.
A family recipe going into retail for the first time. Six heat levels, six labels, one continuous illustration that only resolves when the bottles sit together on a shelf. The scotch bonnet is drawn from a photograph of the founder's own garden.
Full campaign identity for the 2023 edition — poster series, stage graphics, and a programme book. The type treatment stretches a single grotesque until it nearly breaks, then holds. 40,000 posters across the mainland and island.
A digital catalogue of 340 indigo dyeing patterns held in the Kano city archive, many never photographed before. Built to be read on a phone in a market, not a desktop in a museum — every pattern loads under 40KB.
A small independent publisher of poetry in Yoruba and English. We commissioned and art-directed a bespoke text face with proper diacritic support — the first of its kind cut for this pairing. Nine titles to date.
The studio
I'm Adaeze Nwosu. I started Ageless in 2017 out of a two-room flat in Surulere, after six years in-house at an advertising agency where I spent most of my time making work that got approved and forgotten. The name was a joke that stuck: a client once told me my layouts looked "ageless," meaning she couldn't tell when they were made. I decided that was the whole job.
The studio works on four to six projects a year, no more. Most of them are identity systems for food, publishing and civic clients — the kind of work that has to survive being printed badly, photocopied, stitched onto a uniform, and seen from the back of a bus. I do the drawing, the typesetting and the production files myself. I bring in a photographer, a copywriter or a developer when the project genuinely needs one, and I name them on the invoice.
I work in Lagos and I work in Nigerian conditions. That means I design for the printer we actually have, not the one in the case study. It means testing signage in real glare and real traffic. It means a packaging system that survives a humid warehouse in Apapa for eight months. Good design here is not a style — it's a set of decisions that hold up when nobody is watching.
Four stages, roughly twelve weeks
Two sessions, no slides. I want to know who buys the thing, who sells it, and what the last designer got wrong. You get a written brief back within a week — if I've misunderstood the business, you'll see it there and not six weeks later.
Three directions, presented as real artefacts — printed, folded, on the actual substrate. Never a screen mockup. One gets chosen, or we take the strongest parts of two and I redraw. This is the stage where the money is spent and it is worth spending.
The chosen direction becomes rules: a grid, a type scale, a colour logic, a set of do-nots. You get a working manual — not a 90-page PDF nobody opens, but a short document your printer and your social media person can both follow.
I go to the press. Every time. Colour on uncoated stock in Lagos humidity does not behave the way it does on your monitor, and the only way to know is to stand there and pull sheets. Included in the fee, no travel surcharge within Lagos.
Drag sideways
"Adaeze redrew our wordmark eleven times and never once made us feel like a nuisance. The bag system she built is still the thing customers photograph."
Folake Adeyemi — Founder, Ìlé Coffee Roasters
"We had a wayfinding problem that three consultants told us was a budget problem. She solved it with a pictogram set and a hierarchy. Commuters stopped asking staff for directions."
Engr. Musa Danjuma — Oshodi Transit Authority
"She is the only designer we've worked with who asked to come to the factory before quoting. It changed the whole brief."
Bisi Okonkwo — Aunty Bisi's Pepper Sauce
"Our typeface has proper diacritics for the first time in nine books. That sounds small. It is not small."
Tunde Balogun — Publisher, Ìwé Press
"Forty thousand posters, one stretch of type, and the city actually talked about it. That's the whole review."
Amara Eze — Lagos Design Week
Start something
The more specific you are, the more useful my first reply will be. Budget range, timeline, and what's actually broken are the three things I need. If it's not a fit I'll say so and point you at someone better.