Get Guardian on GoogleBy Anote Ajeluorou
When Temple Productions and Pawstudios Africa produced London Life, Lagos Living as a stage performance some months back, it was in response to a demand. Lagos and London share a history, both historical, cultural and even political. But a cross-continental production like demands the unusual from setting to props, especially dresses that portray the lived realities of both cities. But at the centre of it all is a passport without which you can’t travel, both physically and metaphorically, and this is where the design ingenuity of David Ayankoso, whose professional name is Elzenitho, came into the picture.
A passport is an unusually charged surface on which to advertise a play. It suggests travel, but also permission: who can move, who must wait and what a person carries between one life and another. In David Ayankoso’s account of his key art for London Life, Lagos Living, that everyday document becomes the meeting place of two important cities – Lagos and London. It is the most compelling idea in the background material supplied by the Lagos designer, Elzenitho.
The production, adapted from Bobo Omotayo’s book of the same title, was advertised for 28 to 30 August 2026 at the Black Diamond Hotel, Victoria Island, Lagos. Ayankoso’s press pack credits him with the logotype, key art and supporting campaign. The production context is corroborated by public reporting; his precise authorship remains a supplied claim. That distinction matters in a collaborative field where a convincing image can be the work of several people.
His description is specific. An open passport carries London on the left in cool blue-grey, marked by Big Ben, and Lagos on the right in warm amber, marked by the Third Mainland Bridge. A Routemaster and a danfo mirror one another across the spread. This review assesses the concept as described, rather than claiming a close visual inspection of the finished artwork. The supplied Word file contains no embedded artwork, and the web material retrieved did not provide a usable view of this campaign.
As a concept, the passport does more than place two skylines beside each other. It gives their relationship a physical structure and makes the object of travel part of the story. Equal pages offer a useful refusal of the familiar arrangement in which one city becomes the destination and the other merely the point of departure. The idea is economical enough to be understood quickly, a considerable virtue in publicity that must compete for a passing glance.
It also carries a tension that the designer’s explanation does not resolve. Equal space on paper does not mean equal freedom of movement. A passport can signify belonging as readily as exclusion. There is room for a sharper account of class, access and the unequal terms on which people travel between London and Lagos. The device can hold those meanings, but its presence alone does not establish that the campaign explores them.
The landmarks and buses pose a related question. They are efficient identifiers, yet they are also familiar shorthand. Cool London and warm Lagos risk becoming ready-made temperaments rather than lived places. That is a pressure within the proposed visual language, not proof that the finished work fails. Its success would depend on the handling of scale, typography, detail and tone: whether the recognisable symbols open a story or simply label its locations.
Ayankoso’s festival work presents a different test. His pack lists design and art direction for the 2024, 2025 and 2026 editions of Lagos Fringe, spanning key art, schedules, signage, screen content and merchandise. If confirmed, that scope would make this a substantial communications responsibility. A festival identity has to survive contact with changing information. A striking poster offers little help if an audience cannot locate a venue or distinguish one performance time from another.
This is the strongest part of the practice he describes: an interest in design as something people use. Its merits should be tested accordingly. Programme pages, phone-sized announcements and photographs of installed signs would tell an editor more about the system than a selection of polished mock-ups. Repeat commissions may indicate a productive relationship, but they do not by themselves establish accessibility, originality or audience impact.
Film Lab Africa adds institutional constraints to that picture. The British Council confirms the programme and names Afrowren Productions and Darimedia as delivery partners for its first phase. Ayankoso says those partners engaged him in February 2024 for a year of design work. This is a narrower and more credible formulation than implying direct employment by, or artistic endorsement from, the British Council. Working within funder attribution rules can require care and discipline; it cannot stand in for an assessment of the designs themselves.
His public website is less precise than the project account. The About Me and Posters pages describe versatility, storytelling and strategic communication, but much of the language could introduce almost any commercial design practice. The passport explanation is more revealing because it connects a particular decision to a particular problem. More accounts of that kind, including rejected directions and practical compromises, would make his individual judgement easier to recognise.
The pack also describes overseas commercial roles, mentoring and self-initiated tools, including color&tingz and Know Your Nigeria. These suggest an ambition to make design useful beyond a commissioned image. They are worth investigating without treating breadth as an achievement in itself. A free tool needs to work reliably; a mentoring programme needs evidence of what participants gain. Neither an international client nor a long list of activities settles the question of creative distinction.
On the evidence available, Elzenitho has a persuasive design argument, especially where the form of an object helps explain a cultural experience. The passport is memorable because it has a reason to be there. The unresolved issue is execution across the less glamorous parts of a commission, where a visual idea must accommodate information and real use. His work merits closer critical attention. A stronger verdict should follow the finished artefacts, clear credits and evidence from the people who encountered them.
Elzenitho may be reached at: https://elzenitho.org/; https://elzenitho.org/about-us/; https://elzenitho.org/portfolio/posters/
