It was not long ago when designers in the digital medium had to turn the world upside down to find a decent, aesthetically pleasing Bengali font to design materials in Bengali. The best-case scenario was to design a custom typeface completely. The worst, opting for English instead. Bengali is one of the top ten languages in the world and is spoken by at least 200 million people worldwide. And in written form, artists and illustrators had used different variations and designs of Bengali fonts, often vibrant and bold, from hand-painted banners in small shops to movie posters, up until the '90s. But even though the Bengali typography has been in existence in the digital medium since 1980, an organised collection of directories containing aesthetically pleasing Bengali fonts, remained an object of longing. That changed in the summer of 2016, when three friends who shared a common passion for designing, came up with an initiative that would gradually change things for the better in the Bengali typesetting industry.

Bengal Fonts

On the first day of Bengali new year in 2016, Touhedul Islam Himel and two of his friends from Daffodil International University launched a font called "Abirvab" from their studio, Studio Arrival. They started sharing this font in a small number of Facebook groups and their respective timelines. Little did they know that their small initiative will soon go viral. They started noticing Abirvab in banners, billboards and numerous designs on social media. In the first 15 days, Abirvab was downloaded 150,000 times from the Studio Arrival website. Things were never going to be the same again for Himel and his merry band of designers.

After the success of Abirvab and designing a few more fonts, their small passion project was slowly shaping into what we know today as Bengal Fonts. Bengal Font was born out of a passion for designing beautiful Bengali typography and frustration from not having a single organised directory for usable Bengali fonts.

They began to study the first organised Bengali alphabet introduced by Ishwarchandra Bidyasagar which gave them an out-and-out understanding of the proportion and anatomy of individual letters in the Bengali alphabet. They took a methodical approach to design each font, associating an innate story to each font they design and materialising that story in terms of sketches, shapes, and outlines, step by step.

Bengal Fonts currently have 9 fonts in their websites with multiple variations of each. They've introduced a subscription-based system for using some of their premium fonts, the money collected from which goes into researching and designing new fonts and other maintenance costs of the organisation.

The journey that was started by three friends now has six dedicated members working tirelessly to try and improve the condition of the Bengali typesetting industry. Watch out for their new fonts coming out soon on www.bengalfonts.com.

Lipighor

Lipighor's story starts similarly with a group of passionate designers coming together to create a directory for aesthetic Bengali fonts. A team of ten, from both Bangladesh and West Bengal who met each other online on Social Media, started launched Lipighor in September of 2018. Almost one and a half years later, Lipighor now has 35 beautiful and stunning Bengali fonts and a whooping 353,901 downloads under their belt.

Lipighor started with two fonts, Niladri Russian and Ador BakshoI and went on to design more as they slowly became experts in designing Bengali fonts. According to Lipighor, the toughest part of designing Bengali fonts is designing the convoluted geometric shapes of Juktobornos. But that does not seem to stop them.

All the fonts available at Lipighor are free to use at the moment. But they do have a plan to introduce a premium fonts plan in the future as monetisation is crucial for the survival of any organisation, no matter how good free lunches may seem to a user-consumer. Lipighor also has an initiative called "Lipighor creative studio" which works in branding, marketing, and communication for different organisations and brands. They've also launched Bengali calligraphic tee-shirts to inspire a love for language among youngsters.

The founders of Lipighor dream of a designing industry that does not shy away from using Bengali in its linguistic elements for the lack of appealing designs. Order from their impressive line of tee shirts and check out their stunning fonts at www.lipighor.com.

Organisations like Bengal Fonts and Lipighor has carved the way for designers to include more Bengali in their designs. Bury SutonnyMJ under six feet because the freedom to design more appealing Bengali content is finally here and only exciting times lie ahead.