I was in a boring meeting at the beginning of this year, a meeting that makes you question why you are even in this group...
I picked up my pen and started pressing it against the paper as I repeatedly drew a series of circles.
The point grows to become a circle.
The point is the beginning of any shape in life.
I thought, the point resembles me a lot, it resembles my starting point to learn any subject.
In January 2024, I drew a circle on a sticky note and placed it on the wall of my office... and I began to contemplate it every day while I worked.
At the end of January, I finally started the rebranding phase of the course.
Of course, like any respectable former graphic designer, I gathered a lot of trends that I expected might be good...
Until I reached a somewhat good brief about how we want the course to appear.
At that time, the message I wanted to convey to the audience wasn’t clear “as I discovered later”...
We wanted to reach content creators, and companies and large entities to ensure continuity. And almost anyone who has come across the term “digital products.”
We were like a crow trying to impersonate a peacock.
But, this is how what we wanted to reach looked:
“The actual brief we sent to the agency”:
But, since the picture wasn’t very clear, I was always in the wars of the “Sunday Council” meetings, finding a convincing reason to make everyone give us a chance to rethink the brand... I was trying to procrastinate the task hoping that the “monkey” in my mind would find a convincing solution.
Once, Abdulrahman was thinking out loud: We're not moving in the right direction, we're going to people who don't have money and asking them to pay us to ensure their survival... and that's wrong.
A wave of anger and zeal for content creators hit me... for I was, and still am to some extent, one of them, but secretly, I did a little research on content creators in the Arab world to discover that the major ones would not dare to sell digital products... So what are we to do? How big is the market really? And would it be beneficial if, for example, we focused on companies and made the other side of life easier for content creators?
Here I am losing a war against the team as an advocate for content creators... but I believe this will be in our favor in a near future...
Then, in one of the workshops where we were thinking out loud with the team... I asked this question:
To start a flood of questions that made me rethink the entire subject all at once...
Why are we training at all?
I mean, what is the real goal of training a person?
And who are the entities that can make a difference in the training world?
I wrote this sentence in July, on another sticky note and placed it next to the “circle sticky note.”
“A picture from the actual presentation at that time.”
The idea began to materialize in my mind, somewhat, little by little:
We don’t measure real numbers… damn.
We only care about the apparent numbers of what is happening.
No one knows how much it actually affected the trainee’s mind?
Nope.
No one really knows how long the effect of the information will last?
Nope.
Okay, does anyone know what their actual role is as an entity working in the training sector in achieving the vision?
Nope.
Oh my god.
“A moment of realization” as TikTok users say.
It means that the training process in its current form is done on the principle: we throw the clay at the wall and see what will happen...
Damn.
At the beginning of August, I decided to roll up my sleeves and dive back into the design game... for no one would understand what I want to do.
And honestly, “I commend my simple mind that thought the game was just design.”
I gathered a set of references to study about education and training, and this is a group of them, not limited to:
And slowly, the picture began to build in my mind... I literally drowned among the books, it wasn’t hard at all, but it was extremely enjoyable for me...
At that time, I began to learn how to use Figma instead of Adobe Illustrator...
Hossam first told me an interesting term:
Design system
And this is one of the things that distinguishes Figma from Illustrator...
Poor Hossam didn’t know that my mind was on another planet entirely... I was thinking about a course, thinking about education and training as a whole and how we could make training tasks yield real results...
Suddenly, it was four in the morning, and I was on the laptop... writing about the content production system for the course, as a system and since
one thing leads to another, the idea of a modern educational system began to clearly form in my mind with 4k
After two days of continuous research without sleep, I arrived at this blend, these shapes, and these colors... Of course, you can somewhat guess that I believe in the Headspace brand and its genius ability to convey meaning and impact in the gentlest way... but we're targeting B2B, and thus, we need to be “less” spontaneous and nice... so we don’t get lost in the chaos of “social noise”.
By the end of October, the picture became stunningly clear.
And this is a quick picture of how things have become recently... a real screenshot from the Figma file for Msaaq Brand Playbook.
And this is from Msaaq Communication Rules so you can imagine what we will do in the future with this huge system we have invented.
What’s next?!
Oh my god... I’m practically writing this blog post without sleep today out of sheer anxiety; I feel like the whole world is on my shoulders, “even though I know that’s not the case.”
But I believe that over the past five years, we have created a huge, massive monster, an iconic tool capable of changing the whole world.
Nelson Mandela says that “education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world.” And with that, I believe...
We have many rounds... many things to create and little time.
It’s amazing to see together the power of a small group of dreamers agreeing to change the world... through education and training.
And finally...