Felabration

Felabration is an annual festival celebrating the music, life, and enduring legacy of Afrobeat pioneer Fela Anikulapo Kuti. For this self-initiated identity concept, I developed a visual system rooted in the expressive language of Fela’s album artwork and the broader creative culture his work continues to influence.

Many of Fela’s most recognizable album covers were illustrated by Lemi Ghariokwu, whose densely layered, hand-drawn compositions translated the political, social, and cultural themes of the music into rich visual narratives. The artwork felt personal, direct, and inseparable from the ideas behind each record.

Inspired by that relationship between message and form, I created Perambulator Display, a hand-drawn, all-caps OpenType typeface based on the lettering used for Fela’s name on the cover of his 1983 album Perambulator. The typeface includes 11 accented glyphs and was designed as both an homage to Fela’s visual history and a contemporary tool for extending it.

The custom lettering became the foundation of the Felabration identity. Its irregular forms, bold presence, and hand-rendered character gave the system a sense of movement and individuality while helping it remain connected to the visual world surrounding Fela’s music.

The identity expanded across posters, patterns, merchandise, and environmental graphics. Rather than recreating a single album cover, I developed a flexible system that could carry the same energy across different festival applications and scales.

Fela’s influence reaches beyond music into art, fashion, politics, lifestyle, and Nigerian creative culture. The final identity reflects that breadth by treating typography as more than a graphic element. It becomes a living expression of his legacy and the continuing relevance of the ideas he represented.

My role included visual research, typeface design, art direction, identity development, poster design, pattern creation, merchandise design, and environmental applications.