If you are looking for a new kind of font, and one that is uniquely African, then look no further than the premium fonts available. The African Fonts that you will find are those created in a culture that believes in using its rich culture to every possible extent when designing fonts. This means that each of the fonts on the African font galleries are truly a work of art by afrocreators who live in the African continent. Not only does the artwork represent life in Africa, but it also portrays a message that speaks of love and cultural appreciation.
If we take an example of the tribal style face, this can be easily recognized by the word “tribal”. The tribal style can easily be recognized from its distinct feature – the extended rounded shape. As you would know well, the extended rounded shape of the tribal style face is quite similar to that of the African character font family.
An example of this kind of font family would be the kanyakum language script. The kanyakum script is considered as the most popular sans serif typeface design for the African-based languages such as Swahili, Kenyan, Ewe, soron, etc. One more example of an African font family is the kanyakum babo. The babo is one of the oldest known scripts in Africa and is still being used by many native people as their traditional script.
African Inspired Fonts
1. African Gold
The font was so named for two reasons: the intricate African patterns within the characters of the font suggest the shafts and tunnels of a gold mine, and, as with a gold mine, the richness lies within.
African Gold is a display font that is best used at larger sizes, however, it contains a full character set with all accents, special characters, diacritical marks and all the characters are carefully spaced and kerned.
2. African Paradise
frican Paradise a Handwritten Display Font With 3 Style (Regular,Outline and Shadow)
You Can Mix And Match for Your Awesome Project
3. African Textile
The African Textile font had two major influences. The pattern is derived from the bogolan cloths from Africa, originally made using a traditional dyeing technique from Mali that uses bogo or clay as prime dye material.
4. African Shield
African Shield is named for the cow-hide shields used by Zulu warriors.
The shield was an essential part of the weaponry of the Zulu Nation. In the days of the great King Shaka, every Zulu warrior was armed with a shield, one or more throwing assegais (type of spear) and a stabbing spear.
The high-contrast design of the shield has inspired a font that translates into exciting graphic designs.
5. South African
Movie poster style brush typeface.
6. Safari Font
Let’s go on safari! Take our wonderful new font on vacation with you and let it keep your designs wild! The animal print can be considered giraffe, leopard or other! Enjoy!
7. African Elephant Trunk
Based on retro vinyl records in the early and middle of 20th century. This font includes small caps for advanced typography.
Download African Elephant Trunk
8. Maroque
Maroque is a geometric font inspired by the forms and pattern motifs found in Moroccan carpets, artwork and architecture. The pattern motifs most specifically associated with this font design are those found in the textiles of the Maghreb or Berber people of North Africa, these have a kind of bold simplicity that appears decorative, detailed and grid-based.
9. Africana
Natured is a fun, playful, bold display typeface. This font will bring joy and happiness to all of us. Natured is best suited for display, heading, text, print, branding, signage, and more. It comes with a lot of ligature that will give your design a more unique touch in any purpose.
10. Freich
Perfect for posters with super hero, rebellious, or propaganda themes. Its sharp and strong letter forms will make any statements more powerful.
11. Kalimba
Kalimba (name of an African percussion musical instrument) is inspired from common simple shapes present in many visual elements of African and Afro-American cultures. With more than 500 glyphs, Kalimba can be used in European languages (central/east). The font includes some OpenType features as ligatures, fractions and ordinals among others. Recommended for logos, illustrations, games and more graphic design pieces that requires an African taste and essence.
12. Zanzabar
Zanzabar is an exotic display font with a distinctive Middle Eastern flair. Its characters loosely mimic the Arabic script with lowercase letters being much smaller than uppercase. The wispy, brush-like appearance of Zanzabar will work great as an ethnic restaurant logo, children’s book, or movie poster. All caps and small body text are not recommended. Basic and extended Latin, numbers, punctuation, diacritics, kerning, and alternates are included in the full version. Please check the glyph map for all supported characters.
13. Okta Neue
Okta Neue inherits the best traits of Okta—great legibility, simple geometric letters shapes, low contrast across all styles—but also introduces what Okta fell short of: extensive language support and enhanced OpenType features.
14. Assegai
Named for the Zulu traditional spear, Assegai evokes the long, slim outline of the weapon, and the strength of the Zulu warrior. The font combines the irregular shapes of tribal African art with the simple, clean elegance of contemporary design.
15. Afrik
Afrik is a hand painted font which letterforms were inspired by Proto-Saharan Ancient African writing system and scripts for African languages such as Mande and Vai.
16. Afrobeat Light
Think green. With Afrobeat light you save up to more than 35% of your ink toner. Being green in no longer a luxury, but an an essential. By using Afrobeat light you openly demonstrate that your company integrates the 3 Ps into its operations: People, Planet. Profit. Go ahead – be green!
17. Ares
Ares is a crisp all-caps display typeface suitable for sci-fi logos and titles. It owes its peculiar futuristic vibe to angular, top-heavy letters that hang from the cap-height instead of sitting on the baseline.
18. Doorn
In its loose, angular forms, it is reminiscent of thorn bushes dotting the immense Kalahari desert. Spiky and freeform, Doorn calls to mind the irregular hand-drawn lettering found on wooden signs outside small shops in tiny African villages.
19. Zaire SF
Zaire SF is a distinctive, elegant, ethnic style font, inspired by the ancient masking traditions of the tribes indigenous to Zaire in Central Africa. The font captures the magic of the mask, representing the dance, the ceremony, the secret society. It evokes the very heart of Africa.
20. Kenjo
Kenjo I & Kenjo II is an elegant font collection, with Japanese & Art Deco influence. An uppercase character set for display purposes, it houses the standard more versatile Serif (Kenjo I), along with a more fashion-based, stylised option (Kenjo II). Kenjo also includes a versatile collection of unique ligatures, to add a more creative approach to the standard sensibility of Serif based fonts.
21. Costa Std
The original idea of Costa was to create a contemporary mediterranean typeface style. Costa is a synthesis of the purity, as found on Greek capitals, and softness, found in Renaissance scripts. First thing was the design concept that take its roots on the Chancery script. Such writing style appeared during Italian Renaissance. Later few typefaces have been developed from such cursive models. Today most serifed typeface italic take their roots on such triangular structure we can find on gylphs like the n, p, or d.
22. Amhara
An experiment: a “latin” alphabet modelled on the ethiopian Ge’ez script
Cush, Punt, Saba, Aksum, Abyssinia, Ethiopia — the name of this country in Eastern Africa has seen many changes throughout thousands of years of history. Few nations have a similar long history and cultural tradition. Independent as far back as can be remembered, it was one of the “great” kingdoms for a long time. It is also considered the oldest Christian country.
23. Garda
Garda was designed by Sebastian Cabaj and published by Sebastian Cabaj. Garda contains 4 styles and family package options.
24. Castaway
Fun, footloose and fancy free, Castaway is a font family that knows no boundaries: equally at home in Naples and Nairobi, Rimini and Rio, Tijuana and Timbuktu. It was inspired by those ‘far away places with strange sounding names’, and will bring a touch of the exotic to tourist and travel promotions, and a breath of fresh air to any graphics project.
25. Dihjauti
Dihjauti /di:.’hjau.ti: | dee.’hyow.tee/, predominantly based off Dwiggin’s Electra with shades of Palatino and Perpetua, is modern and stately. Like its inspirers, it has broad counters and spacing, which temper it and give it warmth, making it comfortable and well-suited for longer texts. It is balanced in all aspects, from its punctuation to its reference marks and symbols. Its design takes into consideration all extra characters for languages that few fonts support, such as African and First Nation. These extra characters, such as Edh, Esh, Gamma, Ezh, Yogh, the pharyngeal fricatives, the click consonants, which have added capital versions, the glottal stops, et cetera, actually look like they belong, as opposed to being afterthoughts. The italic incorporates a touch of Arrighi. It includes all transcription systems relevant to the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek alphabets, as well as standard Coptic, plus extra characters for Teuthonista and First Nation. It also includes, to list a few, Egyptian-styled pictographs (where applicable), APL, a plethora of mathematical symbols and arrows, and a number of alternatives in the PUA.
26. Aromatron
Aromatron is a friendly yet striking display typeface with a balanced and consistent rhythm. Drawing inspiration from the shapes of nature, unique solutions were employed to achieve a rich, dark, creamy texture.
27. Bfrika
Bfrika is an ‘Africa inspired’ typeface and a contribution for the typographic issue ‘National Typographica’ of I-Juici Magazine, in South Africa. This geometrical decorative design represents bold simplicity, directness and rythm. The name evolved from text for the spread in the magazine. The B replaces the A. Africa be free. Bfrika.
The concept behind Bfrika is to generate an unpredictable visual rhythm in an attractive decorative presentation. Filling up the white space around the letters accentuates form over function, thus creating an interference of visual impressions with its legibility. This visual rhythm is amplified by its redundancy in a text, only pausing at a break or a word space. Based on the concept of separate printing forms in letterpress, Bfrika Two Tone and Bfribat Two Tone separate the letter from the outside form in two fonts. Placing two text frames exactly on top of each other and assigning each part of these font to a frame in a different color, offers a quick way to add color.
28. Socialite JNL
Socialite JNL takes its cue from the Art Deco style of the 1930s with its clean, angular lines and stylized letter shapes.
29. Rimba Andalas
Introducing Rimba Andalas, a playful ethnic font with extra ornaments. This experimental font inspired by the shapes of tree branches and combined with rough strokes such as ancient symbols found inscribed in caves. Perfect for the natural theme, traditional, cultural, folk, tribal, children, adventures and social movement.
30. PAG Norm
Prop-a-ganda offers retro-flavored fonts inspired by lettering on retro propaganda posters, retro advertising posters, retro packages all the world over. This is perfect font for your retrospective project.
