ARCHIVE / Lagos / Needle drop
Archive1960
ArchiveNG
Now sampling1960
Lagos 6.5244 N, 3.3792 E

ARC 004 / DESYear 2005Nollywood posters to pixels

Design

Hand painted Nollywood boards, church posters, Afrobeats covers, and the UI generation remixing it all.

Weathered workshop wall covered in hanging hand tools, coiled rope and worn work clothes2005Placeholder photo by Ariana Prestes / Unsplash, swap in licensed scan
Weathered workshop wall covered in hanging hand tools, coiled rope and worn work clothes
Lead artifact / Ariana Prestes
Film crew around a cinema camera on an outdoor Nollywood shoot
In the field / MediaMOF
Hand painted shop signage on a market street wall in Lagos
Lettering / Zouzou Wizman
Loose print / Ayorinde Ogundele
Loose print / Tuce
Loose print / Kristof Zerbe
Loose print / Clarke Sanders
Loose print / Karly Santiago

Context

Video marketers needed a poster by Friday, so painters worked big, bright and fast. That urgency trained a generation of graphic eyes now working on phones.

Idea

Speed is a style. We keep the brush texture and condensed lettering intact instead of cleaning them into vectors.

Board scale

Nollywood roadside boards documented at full size with painter signatures kept legible.

Hand painted shop signage on a market street wall in LagosZouzou Wizman / CC BY 2.0 / Wikimedia Commons

Lettering

Condensed hand lettering traced as letterforms, with baseline wobble preserved.

Cover grid

Afrobeats single covers filed by type size and sticker placement, not just artist.

Outcome

Launch set holds 40 posters and covers with printer notes and paper stock where known.