I recently teamed up with some guys from The Village Telco to set up Isigidimi (Which means Important Message in Xosa), a telephone network at this year’s Afrikaburn festival, powered with the neat little Mesh Potatoes that they built with funding from the Meraka Institute and the Shuttleworth Foundation. The network ended up having about 10 phones, and from the sound of it, was a great success. The awesome photo above was taken by Steve Song.

Unfortunately I had to pull out about 3 days before I was due to leave for the fair cape due to a disastrous workload, so I missed the whole affair. At least I had the opportunity to design some cool branding for the phone booths and t-shirts. Check it out below.

(Steve Song and David Carman both wrote great reports on the process.)

The design process for the cover (above) was loads of fun. Myself and the other team members were corresponding via email, and I had loads of great suggestions thrown at me at a pace. So, I picked the ones that seemed feasible and easy and worked with them. Suggestions included the use of Ndebele mural art in the design, hidden detail, converting the original logo (below) to a mushroom, getting the roots to connect and more.

The logo

The first rough logo suggestion was proposed by David, made by his friend Ashley. (below)

I quite liked the symmetry and the idea of wifi icons instead of dots on the i’s, but felt that something a lot crazier would be needed for Afrikaburn, so I got out my drawing tools and ended up with what you see below, a wifi tower of sorts, with the “radio waves” emanating from the i’s.

There were immediate calls for this to be made into a mushroom, and how could I deny such a request? So, what you see below ended up being the final logo. We had these printed on some shirts.

Even though I never made it to the festival, I have worn my shirt and the response has been totally mind-blowing. I’ve even had offers from people to buy the shirt off me.

Whoop! The camp got a mention in the Cape Times. Check out the clipping.

Date: April 28, 2010
Author: Diaan Mynhardt
Location: Afrikaburn
Client: Camp Isigidimi
Designer: Diaan Mynhardt
Tags: afrikaburn, isigidimi, mesh, telecoms, wifi