One Year in Type Design: An African Designer’s Journey Through Barriers and Cultural Identity
From Logos to Letters: Why I Took the Leap
In 2023, I began exploring type design out of curiosity and necessity. As a brand designer creating identities for African brands, I struggled to find fonts supporting African languages or resonating with our visual heritage. Most open-source fonts required tedious tweaks to accommodate diacritics or cultural nuance. This gap — between the tools available and the stories we needed to tell — pushed me to ask: What would typefaces rooted in African identity look like? This led me to create Ụdị Foundry, an outlet for my African-inspired type explorations.
Shortly after creating Ụdị, I was fortunate to be commissioned by Google Fonts for my first typeface, Ojuju, which was released in 2024. This marked a milestone and the beginning of a deeper reckoning within an industry that often seems indifferent to Africa’s creative potential.
The Truths I’ve Learned (and Why You Need to Know Them)
1. Type Design is Not a Sprint
Learning type design is unlike other design specialties. Perfecting a single typeface can take months, even years. Every curve, weight, and language support requires time, effort, and obsessive attention to detail. While there are free resources available for learning type design*, formal education in this field remains prohibitively expensive, especially for Africans, thus leaving us with the only option of self-learning, which can make the journey even longer.
2. Money Won’t Fuel Your Journey — Passion Will
I won’t sugarcoat it: type design is not typically a lucrative creative path for anyone trying to get into design in the early stages. Most of my income still comes from branding projects. I design typefaces to escape the corporate grind, not feed it. As you begin, treat this craft as a creative sanctuary, rather than a full-time hustle. If you pursue this solely for profit, you’ll likely experience burnout quickly.
3. The System Wasn’t Built for Us
The global type industry claims to value diversity, yet it often sidelines Africans in several ways:
- Gatekeeping Expertise: Courses and mentorship are scarce or priced beyond reach. While some well-meaning initiatives offer type design scholarships to Africans**, they are few and far between. And deliberately so, because the fewer Africans are in the type design industry, the more the onus to create and develop typography for the African communities rests on the West!
- Pigeonholing Creativity: The type design industry applauds “African” fonts only when they fit narrow stereotypes — often associated with “tribal” motifs or fonts for “decolonization” projects. Meanwhile, designing commercial Latin scripts (the very writing system most of our African communities use in modern times) is seen as “unremarkable” unless it serves a specific Western narrative. We’re told to “decolonize” typography, yet the gatekeepers still hold the keys.
4. Resist the Pressure to Perform “African-ness”
Even as I create typefaces inspired by African culture and stories, I sometimes receive backhanded compliments from those who claim to uphold type design ethics, demanding a specific notion of “African-ness” that supports their agendas. Here’s my stance: Your creativity doesn’t owe anyone a performance. Design a serif font for Swahili newspapers if you wish. Experiment with the Bete script. Or make a sleek Latin sans-serif that can be used on posters in Lagos. Africa’s typographic scene is evolving, and you get to shape it — not the distant custodians living in their type design bubble.
5. Survival ≠ Selling Out
It’s easy for type designers in well-developed nations to romanticize the “decolonizing” type narrative while ignoring our material struggles. They often expect us to jump into type design without providing the necessary support. The reality is that you may need to start where you are, with the resources you have available, designing fonts the way the type design industry has it, perhaps commercially to pay some bills before you begin to grow awareness of African language support and indigenous writing systems. And that’s okay. Survival isn’t betrayal.
A Letter to My Fellow African Designers
So, to any African considering a journey into type design, I say:
- Start Small, Stay Curious: Master the basics of Latin script. Or delve into the writing system of your people if that ignites your passion. But start small. Explore the various ways type can be created and the difference you can make with your fonts. Practice and don’t be afraid to make mistakes until you get it right. Every skill compounds over time.
- Reject the Saviour Complex: You don’t need to “rescue” African scripts overnight. Ignore those who promote this narrative without providing the means and resources to support such a cause. Progress is incremental and if you aspire to elevate African typography, you need to allow it to unfold as you grow a deep understanding of type design.
- Own Your Craft, Define Your Story: Whether you’re designing for heritage or hustle, your perspective matters. We need more Africans contributing to the type design industry without judgment for their chosen paths. There’s a lot of work to be done by us Africans in the world of type. The industry needs your voice, not a watered-down imitation of Western ideals.
Final Words: The Future is Unwritten
A year ago, I viewed type design primarily as a solution to a practical problem. Today, it represents an ongoing statement — showcasing African typography from a cultural perspective, as an embracing change within the world of type, and standing in rebellion against erasure, pigeonholing, and the notion that Africa’s visual language should be dictated by others.
The road is long, but every glyph we design is a step toward rewriting the narrative.
