The design of the Tabwa font was inspired by the font Neuland designed by Rudolf Koch in 1923.

Rather than attempting to re-create his font in a digital form as so many others have done, I have tried to capture the “spirit” of his font and merge this with the spirit of Africa.

As a result the characters differ markedly from Koch’s original styles and have much less of an “Art Deco” look to them. To further modernize the font I have included all the characters missing in Koch’s original (a full lower case, as well as all punctuation, diacritics, special characters etc). The result is a thoroughly modern re-interpretation of the original “Neuland”. The numbers (0 to 9) bear no relation to Koch’s originals but, I believe, are far more in keeping with the alphabetic characters in the font.

The triangles that decorate the characters of this African font are typical of the patterns found in the Tabwa culture of central and west Africa (in the Congo region).