How Nigerian type designer Chisaokwu Joboson is rethinking the possibilities of African typography, from the visual memory of postcolonial streets to the future of global design.
What would it mean for African typography to be more than an adaptation of visual systems developed elsewhere? What might design look like if African languages, histories, material cultures, and ways of seeing were not afterthoughts, but starting points?
These questions sit at the heart of Udi Foundry, an independent type foundry founded by Nigerian designer Chisaokwu Joboson. Working at the intersection of cultural research and contemporary type design, Udi Foundry is developing typefaces that draw from African visual traditions while remaining functional across today’s global design landscape.
Its proposition is both practical and radical: African typefaces should not have to choose between cultural specificity and contemporary relevance. They can carry the textures of local histories into editorial design, branding, digital interfaces, publishing, and visual communication around the world.
Explore the foundry at udifoundry.com and follow its work on Instagram.
Who Gets to Shape the Alphabet?
Typography is one of the most pervasive yet overlooked forces shaping how we experience the world. It determines how information is presented, how institutions establish authority, how brands communicate personality, and how stories acquire a visual identity.
Yet the histories and conventions that dominate contemporary typography have largely been shaped by European and North American design traditions. African graphic cultures, despite their extraordinary diversity, have often been treated as sources of visual inspiration rather than as foundations for sustained typographic research and production.
Udi Foundry offers another approach.
Rather than simply adding African motifs to familiar letterforms, the foundry explores how African cultural references can inform the construction, proportions, rhythm, and character of type itself. The result is work that invites us to consider the alphabet not as a fixed visual system, but as a space for reinterpretation.
This is a particularly important distinction. Representation in design cannot end with the inclusion of familiar patterns, symbols, or imagery. It also concerns who develops the underlying tools of communication, whose histories inform those tools, and which languages they are equipped to serve.
For African designers, publishers, artists, and businesses, typography shaped by African contexts creates new possibilities for communicating without flattening cultural identity into a visual stereotype.
Oja Display: When Culture Becomes Letterform
One of Udi Foundry’s most distinctive projects is Oja Display, a typeface inspired by the Oja, a traditional flute associated with Eastern Nigeria.
The connection between a musical instrument and a typographic system might initially seem unexpected. But it opens up a compelling design question: what happens when the formal qualities of an object, its structure, and its cultural significance become starting points for drawing letters?
In Oja Display, the instrument’s anatomy informs the typeface’s distinctive counterforms—the enclosed or partially enclosed spaces within letters—and its boldly tapered stems. These qualities give the alphabet a sculptural presence, translating a reference from musical culture into a new visual language.
The result is not simply a typeface carrying a cultural reference. It is an exploration of how that reference can influence the architecture of the letters themselves.
Oja Display is designed for expressive applications, including headlines, editorial layouts, branding, and cultural projects. Its character set contains more than 1,000 glyphs and supports over 180 languages, demonstrating that a culturally grounded concept can also be developed with practical typographic versatility.
The typeface was also recognised as a finalist in the Type Directors Club’s TDC72 Type Design Competition, bringing further attention to the possibilities of contemporary African type design.
Touki Grotesk: The Streets as a Design Archive
If Oja Display looks toward the expressive potential of a traditional instrument, Touki Grotesk draws from another archive: the visual culture of African cities during the mid-twentieth century and the early post-independence period.
Hand-painted shop signs, cinema posters, record sleeves, and vernacular print culture are among the references informing this contemporary grotesque sans-serif typeface.
These forms of graphic communication emerged from specific conditions of making. Lettering responded to available materials, the demands of public visibility, the improvisations of individual makers, and the everyday realities of urban life. It was functional, but rarely without personality.
Much of this work existed outside the formal institutions that would later define design history. Yet it shaped the visual environments in which people encountered commerce, entertainment, politics, and popular culture.
Touki Grotesk treats this vernacular lettering as a serious resource for contemporary type design. Its open apertures, compact proportions, and carefully considered terminals retain expressive character while maintaining the clarity expected of a modern type system.
Released in February 2026, the family comprises 14 styles, including weights and matching obliques. It is available in OTF, TTF, WOFF, WOFF2, and variable-font formats, making it suitable for both print and digital applications.
Its language coverage is equally significant: the foundry lists support for more than 800 languages using Latin-based scripts.
Touki Grotesk demonstrates that the visual language of African streets can inform typefaces that function well beyond the contexts from which their inspiration emerged. The past is not being reproduced as nostalgia; it is being reworked into a living design resource.
African languages are not an afterthought
Designing for the Languages We Speak
The question of language is central to the future of African typography.
Across the continent, languages written in Latin script require characters and diacritics that are not always adequately supported by fonts designed around narrower assumptions about language use. A typeface may look beautiful in a headline yet become difficult to use when a designer needs to publish in a local language.
For designers working in African contexts, this is not merely a technical inconvenience. It affects what can be published, which voices can be represented accurately, and whether digital communication systems can accommodate the linguistic diversity of their audiences.
Udi Foundry’s emphasis on language support addresses this problem at the level of the design tool itself. Its work asks designers to consider language coverage alongside aesthetics, rather than treating it as a secondary feature.
This approach is especially relevant to publishing, education, cultural documentation, and digital products intended for audiences across multiple African countries.
A more inclusive typographic infrastructure makes it easier for designers to produce work that reflects the languages people actually speak and write. It also creates opportunities for African typefaces to serve multilingual projects internationally.
Beyond Representation: African Type on a Global Stage
From cultural reference to global utility
The phrase African fonts for global use captures an important ambition.
Global usability does not require a typeface to become culturally neutral. Nor does cultural identity need to be sacrificed to meet the demands of professional design.
Instead, the challenge is to develop typefaces that retain the integrity of their research while meeting the practical requirements of contemporary communication: legibility, coherent family structures, useful character sets, reliable digital formats, and adaptability across different applications.
Udi Foundry’s projects approach this challenge in different ways. Oja Display brings a specific cultural object into expressive lettering, while Touki Grotesk investigates the graphic language of urban African visual culture through a versatile typographic family.
Together, they suggest a broader understanding of African design: not a single aesthetic or unified visual identity, but a field of ideas shaped by different places, histories, languages, and creative practices.
These fonts can be relevant to African cultural institutions and independent publishers, but their potential extends to international magazines, creative studios, brand identities, digital platforms, and designers looking for alternatives to the increasingly familiar typographic choices dominating global visual communication.
The opportunity is not simply to make African culture more visible within existing design systems. It is to expand the range of visual systems available to everyone.
Building an archive for the future
From Vernacular Lettering to Living Archives
African design history contains an enormous body of visual material: commercial lettering, hand-painted signage, film posters, record sleeves, publishing experiments, architectural inscriptions, and graphic traditions developed through generations of making.
Much of this material remains underdocumented, dispersed, or insufficiently represented in dominant accounts of design history.
Working with these references requires more than visual appreciation. It calls for research, documentation, interpretation, and a willingness to recognise the intellectual and creative labour embedded in everyday visual culture.
Type design can be one way of extending that work into the present. A historical reference can become the starting point for a new tool, allowing its influence to circulate through contemporary publishing and digital environments.
The task is not to preserve every historical form unchanged. It is to understand what these forms can teach us, how they emerged, and what new possibilities might follow from engaging with them critically.
In this sense, type foundries can contribute to a living archive of African visual culture—one that does not simply record the past, but allows it to participate in shaping the future.
The radical possibility of African type
Reimagining the Future, One Letter at a Time
The significance of Udi Foundry lies in the questions its work makes possible.
What if African graphic traditions were studied with the same seriousness as the established canons of European typography? What if African languages were treated as essential considerations in type production? What if the visual culture of African streets, instruments, print shops, and everyday objects became a starting point for new typographic systems?
These are not questions that one foundry can answer alone. They point toward the need for a broader ecosystem of African type designers, researchers, publishers, educators, cultural institutions, and users who can support the development and circulation of this work.
But the work of building that ecosystem begins somewhere. With Oja Display and Touki Grotesk, Chisaokwu Joboson is demonstrating how cultural research can become a practical design resource—one that is rooted in African contexts without being confined to them.
Radical imagining, in this context, is not simply about producing letters that look different. It is about expanding who gets to shape the tools through which the world is read, represented, and remembered.
African typography deserves to be understood not as a peripheral category of global design, but as an active contributor to its future.
And the alphabet, it turns out, still has room to be reimagined.
Much of this material remains underdocumented, dispersed, or insufficiently represented in dominant accounts of design history.
Working with these references requires more than visual appreciation. It calls for research, documentation, interpretation, and a willingness to recognise the intellectual and creative labour embedded in everyday visual culture.
Type design can be one way of extending that work into the present. A historical reference can become the starting point for a new tool, allowing its influence to circulate through contemporary publishing and digital environments.
The task is not to preserve every historical form unchanged. It is to understand what these forms can teach us, how they emerged, and what new possibilities might follow from engaging with them critically.
In this sense, type foundries can contribute to a living archive of African visual culture—one that does not simply record the past, but allows it to participate in shaping the future.
