Africa is/in the future 2023
Africa is/in the Future is a festival that takes place in Brussels since 2016. It’s dedicated to showcasing multidisciplinary productions from African and Afro-descendants artists and creators. For the 2023 edition, the festival invited Laurent Mbaah (a.k.a. Simio, a.k.a. Chimères) to create their communication. He partnered with Elodie Goldberg Jacquemain and Alexandre André to create an identity based on a strong yellow/black/white triad.
The main font used for the communication is Frank Adebiaye’s Forward, either in its bolder and wider or thinner and narrower styles. Its sculptural lettershapes led the designers to create illustrative dingbats. Made by pasting parts of glyphs together or overlapping them, they are being used as illustrations for different events.
To accompany Forward, the designers picked Clara Sambot’s DINdong, a font released by the Belgo-French collective Bye Bye Binary and featuring, like all their fonts, special glyphs and ligatures allowing to write in a more gender-inclusive French. The festival made good use of these ligatures across all their publications.
An example of the gender-inclusive ligatures included in the DINdong typeface.
