Inspiration to Start Perxels
As I explained in the previous article, I started as a graphic designer and struggled to learn UIUX. The struggle started when I decided to transition from CorelDraw to Photoshop; I even paid for physical classes to learn Photoshop but ended up being scammed — they ran away with my money. The struggle I experienced while learning UIUX design inspired me to start Perxels.
I remember when Figma agreed to come to my school; I thought they were going to train us all but instead I was given the role of the trainer. I literally knew little to nothing about UIUX then, I read without affirmation that what I was doing was correct. I had to console myself and embrace the fact that I was going to learn everything the hard way, however, I also promised myself that the guys coming behind me were not going to experience the stress I went through.
I became a graduate trainee at CcHUB after school and that was when I realised that UIUX wasn’t as hard as I thought. I also began to understand how to work in a techspace and team work. This inspired me to train others in UIUX. I organised 3-days bootcamps at institutions like University of Ibadan (UI), Kwara State University (Kwasu), Ladoke Akintola University of Technology (Lautech), University of Ilorin (Unilorin), University of Lagos (Unilag) and University of Benin (Uniben) to train and teach students on what I knew.
I once came across a UIUX design school that had the finances to train their students well but didn’t. The students paid heavily and were poorly trained for 3 weeks. I was so sad to see that and I decided to build a school that was affordable, involved a lot of discipline as well as training people in the right way. All these together inspired me to build Perxels.
The First Official Mentees
The bootcamps I organised built design interest in a lot of students and some reached out to me to train them further. The 3-days just weren’t enough for them. I started training them virtually but individually. I did that because although I believe in teamwork, I also believed that people had different styles of learning and I wanted to train each student based on how they learn.
I created a WhatsApp group for each student and called it “Just2ofUs (Name of Student)”. I reached out to them often, gave assignments and reviewed their designs also.
Later this year, after I had already started working at CcHUB and I couldn’t keep up with the individual training. The workload was too much for me and my level of consistency drastically dropped. This was why I brought them together and formed the First Cohort Students of Pixel Perfect (This was the first name we chose for the design school).
Challenges faced while starting Perxels.
I definitely faced challenges when Perxels started. My first team consisted of my mentees- I didn’t want to train them on only the technical skills but also the soft skills. I wanted them to have a feel of how to work together to achieve a common goal but at first, they didn’t understand the vision of Perxels and couldn’t align to the goal. They saw me as a really strict person when I corrected them on their roles. This made starting up really hard. I believe in consistency and consistency is a strong and overbearing force for anyone who isn’t willing to go beyond their limit. Presently, my team majorly consists of graduant of Perxels
Also, financial issues set in. The first mentees were trained for free and so, there was no money to the brand’s name. I had to use my salary to compensate the team members as well as set up the brand (Logo, adverts, designs, etc). I don’t think I’d tag it as “a challenge”, because I felt it was a price I had to pay to build the future of the school.
UIUX has taught me alot about problem solving and has also opened my eyes to various ways of solving problems. Every challenge I face in Perxels is like a design case study waiting for me to solve it and this has helped me in pushing further.
In the next article, I’d walk you through how the name “Perxels” came to light, the branding process and give you a little gist about the team members.
