A guy messaged me last week. 23, just finished NYSC, saved ₦180,000 from his allowee and wants to spend it on one thing.
Canva and Figma, or ads and SEO?
He has been asking people for two months. Everybody gave him the same useless answer: “do both, they work together.”
They do work together. That is not advice. That is a way of avoiding the question.
So here is mine.
The case for design first
Design pays faster. Let us be honest about that.
A decent designer in Nigeria can charge for a logo in month three. Flyers, IG carousels, pitch decks, menu designs for a restaurant in Surulere. Small tickets, but they land quickly.
The work is also visible. You post it, someone sees it, someone asks who made it. Your portfolio builds itself while you sleep.
And clients can judge it instantly. Nobody needs a 90-day report to know whether they like a logo.
The case for marketing first
Marketing pays bigger. Slower, but bigger.
The designer charges for the flyer. The marketer charges for the result the flyer was supposed to produce. Those are not the same conversation, and they are not the same invoice.
A designer who charges ₦40,000 for a set of graphics is competing with 4,000 other people who also own Canva. A marketer who can show a client that ₦150,000 in ad spend returned ₦900,000 in sales is competing with almost nobody in this country, because most people cannot prove that second number.
Marketing is also harder to hand to a machine. Anybody can generate a passable graphic now. Far fewer people can look at a Nigerian SME’s numbers, work out why the ads are failing, and fix it.
My actual answer
Learn design first. Build your career on marketing.
Not because design is better. Because of the order money arrives.
Marketing has a long runway. You need something to test on, and testing requires a real budget or a real client. Most people quit before that first result lands, not because they were bad at it, but because rent came before the win did.
Design gets you paid inside 90 days. Those small design jobs are what fund your marketing education, and the clients you design for become the clients you later run campaigns for. You are already inside their business. You already have their trust.
✅ Month 1 to 3: learn design well enough to charge. Not Behance-level. Charge-level.
✅ Month 3 to 9: take design jobs. Bank the money. Study marketing at night.
✅ Month 9 onward: go back to your design clients and offer to run the campaign, not just make the asset.
The trap I want you to avoid
Do not stay a designer for four years because it is comfortable.
I have watched this happen to people I like. They get good at design, the ₦50,000 jobs keep coming, and five years later they are still charging ₦50,000 while the guy who hired them is now paying an agency ₦2 million a quarter.
Design is the door. It is a good door. But it is not the room.
The people earning properly in this market are not the ones who chose. They are the ones who started with the skill that paid rent, and refused to stop there.
Now tell me I am wrong. Some of the best designers I know would fight me on this, and I want to hear it.
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