KDK: designing the mentorship I couldn't find.

The problem

Where do African designers go to grow?

The gap wasn't information — the internet is drowning in design content. The gap was honest, reachable conversation: people a few steps ahead, in your context, telling the truth about rates, rejection, bad clients, self-teaching, and what the work actually feels like. Mentorship as it existed was either formal and foreign, or informal and locked inside networks I wasn't in.

I wasn't the only one outside those networks. That hunch — that my problem was a market's problem — was the founding insight, and everything since has been testing it.

The first design decision

Episode one was just me. And the grasshoppers.

The first episode had no guest. It was me, alone with a mic, introducing myself — and telling people things I'd never told anyone. Including that I have eaten grasshoppers, that I liked them, and that I would absolutely do it again.

I didn't plan to open with grasshoppers — it just came out, and I let it stay. Because I understand that vulnerability, at some point, makes you human. A community built on honest conversation has to hear what honesty sounds like before anyone else will risk it, and the founder goes first. Episode one was the prototype for the whole product.

Episode two brought the first guest, Stephanie Kabi, and the format found its shape: candid conversations with designers further along, recorded so the person who couldn't find mentorship could at least overhear it.

The failure — the real one

In mid-2024, KDK stopped. Completely.

We halted production — not a break, a full stop. We had good people and real momentum, and none of it mattered, because we had no structure and no roadmap. Everything ran on my energy, and when my energy ran out, so did KDK.

Worse: when we resumed in 2025, I still hadn't diagnosed it. I treated the collapse as a stamina problem — rest, come back, push harder. So we came back exactly the way we'd fallen: structureless. It took most of that year winding down for the truth to land. Even the best team gets nowhere without structure. The problem was never talent or commitment. It was that there was nothing for talent and commitment to run on.

The rebuild

Now I design the structure first.

KDK today runs on systems — and I won't pretend they came from foresight. They came from scar tissue. Once the diagnosis landed, I rebuilt KDK the way I'd build any product: with an operating system that doesn't depend on anyone's good week.

The culture is holding. Recently the two people who run KDK's ground game came back from a campus tour where nearly everything broke — running late, speakers not showing, the whole day fighting them. They came home frustrated. And then they said something I keep thinking about: "the fact that we're frustrated doesn't mean it wasn't a successful day." Without those two, KDK would be on its second halt right now. It isn't.

The identity had to be redesigned too

v1 didn't speak the language. So we changed it.

KDK's first identity was shades of green — green on green on green. It looked like a design community, sure. Any design community. And that was the problem: it misrepresented us. KDK isn't a generic professional network; it's honest conversation, warmth, people telling the truth about the work. The all-green identity said none of that.

Version 2 keeps the forest green as the ground — rooted, steady, ours — and brings in amber: the warmth of the actual conversations. The colour of a light left on. It's the difference between a brand that says "designers meet here" and one that says "come talk, honestly."

Typography followed the same correction — Plus Jakarta Sans for the voice of the brand and Sora for everything members actually read, chosen because it is precise but never cold. It holds its own without shouting. The kind of typeface that makes reading feel easy, which is exactly how KDK should feel to engage with. Guidelines now exist as a documented v2 — because an undocumented brand is how you end up with v1 twice.

What it taught me

What building a community teaches you about product.