AfCFTA Secretariat · inaugural edition · 2025
A continental identity that read as policy and felt like culture.
Creative strategy, identity system, experiential design and production oversight for the inaugural AfCFTA Forum & Festival.
Work / Institutional / Creatives Connect Africa 2025
Creative strategy, identity system, experiential design and production oversight for the inaugural AfCFTA Forum & Festival.
A first-edition continental platform with two audiences that don't usually share a brand: trade ministers and filmmakers, sovereign investors and fashion designers, technocrats and musicians. Get it wrong either way and the platform reads as either bureaucracy or festival.
Creatives Connect Africa 2025 was the inaugural AfCFTA Forum and Festival on Tourism, Creative and Cultural Industries — convened by the AfCFTA Secretariat with Ghana's Black Star Experience and Africa Tourism Partners. The brief: position Africa's creative industries as catalysts for trade and continental integration, not as soft-power decoration.
The working rule: if a piece couldn't pass as a policy document and read as a cultural artefact at the same time, it wasn't finished. Five layers, one system — a typographically disciplined identity with cultural energy carried through colour and material; one grid and type system across programme guides, delegate packs, partner communications and policy documents; the venue treated as a single environment; a main stage carrying institutional weight; and a strict signage hierarchy — delegate information first, partner visibility second, decoration last.
A strict signage hierarchy — delegate information first, partner visibility second, decoration last — kept a festival's energy legible as a policy environment, and vice versa.
Policy registrants didn't read it as festival; creative delegates didn't read it as bureaucracy. By holding both registers inside one identity, the platform earned the right to convene both constituencies again — with a visual system its conveners can extend across future editions.