Growing up in Ghana during the 1990s, the author was surrounded by vernacular typography, hand-painted shop signs, advertising banners, and event posters that covered the walls of their community. This visual landscape sparked a fascination with letterforms and typography that began in childhood and evolved through high school, where they started designing letters for classmates and exploring graffiti tagging.
Their journey in typography has been marked by significant achievements, including curating exhibitions that highlight the uniqueness of vernacular typography and its digital preservation. This work led to a major milestone: being commissioned by Google Fonts to design a typeface inspired by these vernacular styles, with the goal of creating a font that supports over 900 languages while remaining true to its origins.
The author draws inspiration from travelling and observing the visual language of different places, from hand-painted posters on streets to vernacular architecture. Their work focuses on preserving Ghanaian vernacular design styles in the digital realm, capturing the distinctive lettering seen on local hand-painted posters and adapting them into functional digital typefaces.