Meet Noella Ekezie, Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Ellae Creative

An innovative thinker with a passion for design, Noella Ekezie, in 2011, established Ellae—a Lagos-based integrated brand and communications agency. Originally trained as a Chemical Engineer at the University of Lagos, Noella furthered her education at Parsons School of Design, New York and Harvard Business School where she studied Strategic Marketing Management via an Executive Education program. She chanced upon design while in high school and was able to develop her competence during her program at Parsons.

Reputable for translating business requirements into creative, high-impact solutions, Noella’s specialism in brand identity development was influenced by her brief stint at a branding consultancy at the dawn of her career. There, she was part of the team that worked on the Heritage Bank rebranding exercise that exposed her to the impact of branding processes on corporate organizations.

Her engineering background affords her the analytical skills with which she has built an enviable problem-solving career. She views design as a transformational creative process that is essential for visual communication, raising visibility, reinforcing messaging and driving conversions.

Noella usually starts her design projects with strategy. Then ideation, which builds up into the collaborative and iterative design phase. Finally, the production phase—where digital assets are created and a high-fidelity version of the product is validated with stakeholders and end-users. This process has birthed many remarkable projects such as Union Bank’s UnionOnline and Union Mobile which are being used by over 2,700 staff members and almost 2 million customers. Another project worthy of mention is the Google Footprint Project, by the end of which over 100,000 business premises were listed in Lagos in a 3-month period.

Some other local and international brands for which Noella and her team have worked include: USAID, BASF Germany, Nike Foundation, Exxon Mobil, Citibank, Cognizant, Girl Effect, Sterling Bank, Keystone Bank, Paga and Wakanow. Accordingly, she has earned for herself numerous recognitions like: Grand Jury Member (Design Category), Lisbon International Advertising Festival 2018, four-time medallist at the Transform Awards in Dubai, and Mentor at the Cherie Blair Foundation, the Tony Elumelu Foundation and For Creative Girls. In 2018, The Guardian named Noella Ekezie among Nigeria’s 100 Most Inspirational Women. Noella believes design helps to develop a broader, more divergent view of problems and distils that big picture into actionable ideas based on more convergent thinking. Earlier in her career, she was beset by the rarity of industry champions before she began to draw inspiration from Paul Scher, Michael Bierut, Stefan Sagmeister, Ije Nwokorie, Pentagram, Landor, Interbrand, Wolf Ollins and Anagrama. In her shortlist of recommended books and blogs are: Designing Brand Identity by Alina Wheeler, Thinking with Type by Ellen Lupton, Creative Workshop by David Sherwin, 99u, Just Creative, Brand New and Logo Design Love.

To Noella, the future will include tools and methodologies coming from strategic foresight: technologies such as AI will drive parametric design which will enable designers to quickly and easily create millions of variations of their work and, as a result, dramatically increase productivity. In turn, future designers will need to push boundaries and keep focus on design innovation. She then advises upcoming designers to diversify their skills to maximize opportunities for passive income, to build strong personal brands and develop powerful networks, to pursue formal education when and where possible, and to learn to market and sell their services on value instead of price.

Noella’s Ellae is the backbone behind initiatives like Designers Arise Platform and Tech and the Girl, and the team is preparing to launch Ellae Central, an online training platform for creative professionals.

Noella Ekezie—married with four kids—is also a brand strategist, front-end web developer and lover of research.