Open Font Design Competition 2025
The Rachana Institute of Typography (
First announcement
In first of a kind movement, in the month of May 2024, the Foundations jointly announced a font competition to develop and promote traditional Malayalam script. Of the many enthusiastic responses from designers all over India, an initial set of ten designs were shortlisted — from a mix of experienced type designers and novice non-technical ones. Type design requires complex engineering due to technical aspects like Unicode encoding schemes and text-shaping. This complexity was hidden from the non-technical designers by the software tools developed by RIT to manage collaborative font projects.
The workshop
In August 2024, the Foundations organized an in-person workshop for two days. Eminent typographers and language technology experts conducted sessions and provided feedback and guidance to the aspiring designers.
Participants of the font workshop held at River Valley Campus, Trivandrum, in August 2024.
The panel of jury and evaluation
Font submissions were evaluated by a jury of experts consisting of Dr. KH Hussain, typographer and creator of Rachana and Meera fonts; Narayana Bhattathiri, renowned calligrapher and designer of Chingam and Ezhuthu fonts; Vaishnavi Murthy, type designer, Unicode standard and multi-scripts expert; and Rajeesh KV, font engineer and free software activist.
Another round of mid-term evaluation of the basic character set was conducted by the jury in October 2024. Detailed feedback on glyph design and typographic corrections were conveyed to font designers in online sessions.
The final font submissions were made in December 2024, which the jury members thoroughly evaluated based on multiple criteria: design æsthetics, typography finesse, glyph coverage, legibility, usability, uniqueness, quality, etc. Font designers improved their designs based on the feedback.
The results
The jury announced the final results in March 2025. The RIT-KaChaTaThapa-Sayahna foundations are proud to be enablers in contributing a set of six new fonts to the world wide Malayalam language community. All the fonts can be freely downloaded and used according to Open Font License, from the website of RIT.
The winners
The winners of the competition are given below:
| Place | Prize ( | Style | Font name | Designer(s) | City | |
| 1 | 2,50,000 | Calligraphic | RIT Thaara | Karambir Singh Rohilla | Delhi | |
| 2 | 1,50,000 | Text | RIT Lekha | Rahul Radhakrishnan | Kottayam | |
| 3 | 1,00,000 | Display | RIT Lasya | Krishnakumar PV | Ernakulam | |
| 4 | 30,000 | Script | RIT Ala | Radhakrishnan VN, Aswathy J | Kottayam | |
| 5 | 30,000 | Display | RIT Keram | Sanesh MV | Kannur | |
| 6 | 30,000 | Display | RIT Indira | Sudheer S | Trivandrum |