Results of RIT-KaChaTaThaPa-Sayahna open font competition 2025

Wednesday, 16 April 2025  |  Rajeesh K Nambiar

In first of a kind movement to develop free and open source fonts for traditional Malayalam scripts, the Rachana Institute of Technology, KaChaTaThaPa Foundation and Sayahna Foundation had previously announced font design competition in May 2024.

Many participants registered from all over India and shared their initial design of a few selected characters. Ten submissions were shortlisted, and the selected participants were invited for a two-day in person workshop conducted at River Valley campus, Trivandrum. The workshop was lead by the jury members — Dr. KH Hussain who designed notably Rachana and Meera fonts (among many other); eminent calligrapher and designer of Sundar, Ezhuthu, Karuna & Chingam fonts, Narayana Bhattathiri; type designer and multi-scripts expert Vaishnavi Murthy; and yours truly. High quality sessions & feedback from the speakers and lively interactive sessions enlightened both experienced and non-technical designers about the intricacies of typeface design.

Participants of the font workshop held at River Valley Campus, Trivandrum, in August 2024.

Refinement

To manage the glyph submissions for collaborative font projects, a friend of mine and I built a web service. The designers just need to create each character in SVG format and upload into their font project. This helped to abstract away from the designers all the technical complexities, such as assigning correct Unicode codepoint, correct naming convention, OpenType layout & shaping etc.

There was mid-term evaluation of the completed glyph set in October 2024; and a couple of online sessions where the jury pointed out necessary corrections and improvements required for each font.

The final submissions were done near the end of December 2024; and further refinements ensued. All the participants were very receptive to the constructive feedback and enthusiastic to improve the fonts. The technical work for final font production was handled by your humble correspondent.

Results

In March 2024, the jury made a final evaluation and adjudged the winners of the competition. All the six fonts completed are published as open source, and they can be downloaded from Rachana website. See the report for the winning entries, font specimens & posters, prize money, and all other details.

RIT Thaara (താര), calligraphic style, named after Sabdatharavali.

RIT Lekha (ലേഖ), body text font.

RIT Lasya (ലാസ്യ). The Latin glyphs were drawn independently based on Akaya Kannada font, as suggested by a jury member.

RIT Ala (അല).

RIT Keram Bold (കേരം).

RIT Indira Bold (ഇന്ദിര).

I am very happy to have the chance to collaborate over the course of a year with designers from various backgrounds to develop beautiful traditional Malayalam orthography fonts and make them all available under free license. I would like to thank the jury members who did exemplary work in evaluating the designs and providing constructive feedback & guidance multiple times that helped to refine the fonts; CVR for the work to create web pages on Rachana website; and the three Foundations for the initiative and funding to make this all possible. Full disclosure: all the jury members worked in volunteer capacity.

Next competition

RIT-KaChaTaThaPa-Sayahna foundations have already announced plans for next open font design competition! This time the focus is on body text fonts.