The Living Digital Archive for African Graphic Design

African Design Archive is an independent non-profit initiative dedicated to the documentation and showcase of African visual culture, past and present. Founded in 2026 by Chisaokwu Joboson, African Design Archive seeks to decenter graphic design history from Western narratives and expand its foundations beyond Eurocentric visual culture. The archive was conceived to address the exclusion of African visual design from global design history and the scarcity of accessible archives concerned with African design's past.

African Design Archive gathers what has been scattered and makes it findable, nameable, and usable. Where institutional memory has been absent or indifferent, African Design Archive steps in: building a space where African design can be studied, referenced, celebrated, and built upon.

Mission

African Design Archive aims to serve as a focal point for the research, promotion, and preservation of African visual culture, recentering African indigenous design history as part of the global conversation of design.

Archival process

We do our best to maintain the accuracy of our images and contents, but our process has limitations as sometimes information is not always easily available. Image quality varies, as many items are sourced from photocopies, scans, and photographs of printed matter or existing digital sources. Write-ups are based on materials discovered at publishing and will be updated as new information emerges. Where possible, we share our references to encourage independent verification and further research. If you find a mistake or can help provide missing information, please get in touch.

Copyright

We are a non-profit initiative. We do not own the rights to any material in the archive. All items are presented for educational, research, and non-commercial use only. If you are a rights holder and would like a piece removed, please contact us.

Submit

This archive is a village project. If you have a piece of African graphic design history worth preserving — a poster, a book cover, a type specimen, an identity, an illustration — we want to hear from you.

Site Credits

Contact

For rights, corrections, collaborations, or archive enquiries,
contact hello@africandesignarchive.com