James Udotong is a student of the University of Lagos and should be in his penultimate year, but ASUU and FG have been bickering going eight months now, leaving him to focus on his Brand and Product Design projects.

James, 20, says he has been designing for the past four years – since August 2018 – and has had a rough journey, starting out with programming, before he switched careers.

I am also interested in robotics.

The years before Product Design

James Udotong says that his earliest encounter with tech was with the game world when he would watch movies or games and be fascinated by what he saw.

He would wonder about the characters or the creators and how they did it, so “I dived into game-making, and I created a game when I was eight. I had gone through some tutorials. That is how I started coding.”

But, like many who wanted to be doctors or lawyers or engineers when they were younger and ended up as Instagram content creators, James started ‘seeing the light’ in graphic design, but he did not start a career in design until later.

He finished high school and could not stay idle, so he continued to explore coding, flutter, python, C# and JAVA. He says, “I am more like a generalist.”

Interestingly, he received the kind of support that would help him get better at his craft from family and friends. He says it is probably because they already knew he could do stuffs on PCs.

“But when the coding was too much, and there were no results, they started asking questions. But my brother still supported me with data and encouraged me,” James says.

He stopped coding officially in 2020 when he tried balancing it with product design, and “it was not working.” Those times, “I did not know what else to do, so I would spend the whole day coding”, he said.

James was obsessed with the idea of coding and now with solving problems.

On being a Product Designer

James was self-taught and “did not believe in bootcamps.” But he says taking courses, and bootcamps are as good as they give you structure and a solid foundation.

However, he says he uses Coursera, YouTube, and Google to learn and become better at his craft.

For his work, he uses the Adobe collection because it is design intensive. Specifically, he recommends Figma for product design.

“You can earn a living out of Product Designing, and it is a matter of mindset,” James says.

We took him back to when he was coding, and he says he used Android Studios “because I was doing flutter.” He adds that he used PyCharm, Anaconda, and Microsoft Visual Studio.

James Udotong’s most exciting project

He already knows to code, but that is not where his allegiance lies.

He is the Product Designer/co-Founder of Skibbble – a food social networking platform (launched on August 8, 2022) just like Instagram, but this time for foodies. His work here is to ensure aesthetics are adequately covered.

James is also the Chief Brand Officer of Skibble, and he says it has been an awesome journey, as the team has experimented a lot while studying other social platforms.

The app has not started generating revenue and will rely on raises, ads, and a chef functionality to be sustainable, but that feature is restricted to chefs in Canada, as “we are looking for ways to verify chefs and for security reasons.”

However, James is already filling his pockets with a high-paying job and freelance gigs.

I got a job three months ago as a Product Designer. They just came to me, and I what I earn there is a six-figure per month.

School and Product Designing?

Thanks to the ASUU strike, James says he is relatively free to work, but when school resumes, he is a student during the day and a designer at night.

“I have been managing it, and it has been good. I am in control of my time.”

Words for young (+intending) techies

“Don’t do it for the money!” James almost screams. He says it should not be about money as the ‘money will come.’

He says he worked for two years without pay, and passion should be the motivation.