African Typefaces and the Designers Behind Them
We use fonts every day without really thinking much about them.
We type messages, write documents, scroll through social media and see hundreds of different fonts without stopping to wonder where they came from. We notice whether a font looks bold, elegant, playful or serious, but we rarely think about the person behind it.
Yet every font was created by someone.
Someone decided how a letter should curve, how thick its strokes should be, how much space should sit between characters and what the overall shape of the alphabet should communicate. Every tiny detail is a design decision. For much of digital history, however, African designers have been largely absent from that process. Many of the typefaces used around the world were also not designed with African languages in mind, leaving important characters, tonal marks and diacritics unsupported or poorly represented. But that is beginning to change.
Across the continent, a growing generation of African type designers is creating fonts rooted in local visual traditions, languages and histories. Some draw from hand-painted street signs and traditional crafts. Others look to ancient writing systems or important moments in African cultural history.
Together, they are showing that typography can be more than something we simply read. It can carry memory, identity and culture too. They are bringing African histories and visual traditions into an everyday part of digital life.
Ga Maamli - Afotey Clement Nii Odai, Ama Asantewa Diaka & David Abbey-Thompson
Ga Maamli began not in a design studio, but on the streets of Accra.
In coastal Ga communities such as Jamestown, Chorkor and Nungua, hand-painted signs and posters once announced boxing matches, concerts and parties in bold, expressive lettering. David Abbey-Thompson, a partner at Aayalolo Foundry and project director of Accra’s Akutso Design Lab, spent years documenting this style of vernacular signage before working with Afotey Clement Nii Odai and Ama Asantewa Diaka to develop it into a digital typeface. Commissioned by Google Fonts and released in 2024, Ga Maamli retains the informal, hand-drawn quality of the original lettering while turning it into a functional typeface.
Its importance goes beyond its appearance. As the font captures a form of Ghanaian visual culture that has increasingly disappeared from the streets, preserving the character of hand-painted lettering in a format that can now be used digitally. Abbey-Thompson, has always been fascinated with lettering. Growing up around Accra’s hand-painted shop signs and event posters showed him how much identity could be carried through something as ordinary as handwriting.
Agbalumo - Raphael Alẹ́gbẹ́lẹ́yẹ̀
Named after the Yoruba word for the African star apple, Agbalumo is a playful, chunky display typeface inspired by brush lettering.
It was created by Nigerian type designer Raphael Alẹ́gbẹ́lẹ́yẹ̀, whose work focuses on developing typefaces that better serve African languages, and developed with American type foundry Sorkin Type. But the most significant part of Agbalumo may not be its distinctive appearance but rather , its extensive language support allows it to work across more than 500 languages that use the Latin script, including Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo, Wolof, Fula and Maasai. It also supports the Ge’ez script used across Ethiopia and Eritrea.
That makes Agbalumo more than just a font for branding and cultural projects. It demonstrates what happens when African languages are considered at the beginning of the design process rather than added later as an afterthought. Its visual personality may attract attention, but its language support is what gives the typeface a lasting significance.
Sankofa Display - Batsirai Madzonga
Sankofa Display takes its name from the Akan concept of Sankofa, that is, looking to the past in order to move forward.
Commissioned by Google Fonts and released in 2024, the typeface was designed by Zimbabwean designer Batsirai Madzonga, who drew inspiration from elements of African visual heritage. Its letterforms reference the geometry of Zimbabwean clay pots, the carved Zimbabwe Bird featured on the country’s national emblem, and traditional Zulu beadwork. Straight lines, circles and dots come together to create a bold geometric display font.
Madzonga’s intention was not simply to create something that looked “African.” But rather by extension, the design translates specific cultural objects and visual forms into a typeface that can be used by designers. This results to a font that connects contemporary digital design with physical objects and traditions that existed long before digital typography.
Tac One - Afrotype
Tac One carries the history of one of Africa’s most significant cultural gatherings directly into its letterforms.
The typeface was developed by Afrotype, the Lagos-based type studio founded by Seyi Olusanya alongside Eyiyemi Adegbite and David Udoh, with additional input from Mirko Velimirović. Its name and visual language are drawn from the wordmark of FESTAC ’77, the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture held in Lagos in 1977.
The festival brought artists and cultural figures from across Africa and the global Black diaspora together in Lagos. Tac One revisits the bold geometric lettering used on the banners and signage associated with that era and translates it into a contemporary digital typeface. Released through Google Fonts in 2024, the font also includes an extensive African Latin character set designed to support numerous Sub-Saharan languages.
In that sense, Tac One does two things at once. It preserves the visual memory of a major Pan-African cultural moment while at the same time also giving that aesthetic a new life in contemporary design.
Agụ Display - Seun Badejo
Agụ Display takes inspiration from one of West Africa’s most intriguing historical communication systems, that is, Nsibidi.
Designed by Nigerian multidisciplinary designer Seun Badejo, the decorative rounded sans-serif draws on the visual language of Nsibidi, a system of symbols historically associated with communities across the Cross River region and parts of Cameroon. The typeface also introduces a technical feature that allows its letterforms to change shape through a morphing substitution axis.
That fluidity reflects one of the central ideas behind the project, which is creating a connection between historical symbolism and contemporary typography. Rather than treating African visual heritage as something to simply reproduce, Agụ Display explores how it can be translated into a modern digital design system.
This results to a typeface that turns historical symbolism into something contemporary designers can interact with and use.
Ojuju - Chisaokwu Joboson
Ojuju is a different interpretation of what an African typeface can look like. Designed by Nigeria-based brand and type designer Chisaokwu Joboson, the font takes the structure of the grotesque sans-serif, one of the most familiar traditions in modern typography and approaches it through an Afro-grotesque perspective.
Rather than relying on obvious cultural symbols or traditional motifs, Ojuju demonstrates that African type design does not have to look the way people might expect an “African” font to look. It can also mean taking established typographic traditions and developing new interpretations of them from an African perspective.
That makes Ojuju part of a larger conversation about what contemporary African design can be when designers are not limited to only representing culture through obvious visual references.
Madimi - Taurai Valerie Mtake
Zimbabwean visual communicator and type designer Taurai Valerie Mtake takes a more subtle approach with Madimi.
The rounded sans-serif combines geometric structures with more organic forms, producing a typeface that feels fluid and approachable. Released as part of Google Fonts’ growing collection of African typefaces, Madimi sits alongside projects such as Ojuju and Tac One while offering a very different visual language.
Together, these fonts demonstrate that there is no single “African” approach to typography. African type design can be bold or understated, geometric or organic, historical or experimental. What connects these projects is not one particular look, but the decision to create from African perspectives and experiences.
Why African-Type Design Matters
The significance of African type design goes beyond mere aesthetics reason being that, for years many digital typefaces were primarily designed around European languages before being expanded to accommodate other writing systems and languages. That approach has often left African languages with inadequate support for the tonal marks, diacritics and extended characters they require.
Projects such as the Pan-African Latin expansion of Questrial demonstrate why this matters. Supporting languages such as Bambara, Lingala and Yoruba is not simply a matter of making a font look better. Rather, it determines whether those languages can be represented accurately in digital spaces.
That makes typography part of the larger infrastructure of language and culture. The designers behind these typefaces are therefore doing more than creating attractive lettering. They are documenting visual traditions, developing tools for African languages and questioning whose histories and design traditions get represented in the digital environments people use every day.
Taken together, Ga Maamli, Agbalumo, Sankofa Display, Tac One, Agụ Display, Ojuju and Madimi point towards a growing confidence within African typography.
Though their inspirations may differ from street signs and traditional crafts to FESTAC ’77 and ancient communication systems but they share a common idea that is, African visual culture does not have to remain confined to museums, archives or physical spaces.
It can live in the letters on a screen we use every single day too. And perhaps that is what makes this typeface renaissance worth paying attention to. These fonts are not simply changing how African stories look. They are helping determine how those stories, languages and histories exist in the digital world.