Hind Mysuru

Hind Mysuru is a family of five Kannada fonts, which are part of the Indian Type Foundry’s larger Open Source Hind Multi-Script project. Hind Multi-Script is a type system providing nine stylistically-matching font families – one for each of the following writing systems used in Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka: Bengali, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, and Sinhala. In addition to Kannada, the Hind Mysuru fonts also include Latin-script characters.

Developed explicitly for use in User Interface design, Hind’s letterforms have a humanist-style construction, paired with seemingly monolinear strokes. Most of these strokes have flat endings: they either terminate with a horizontal or a vertical shear, rather than on a diagonal. This helps create clear-cut counter forms between the characters. Additionally, Hind’s letterforms feature open apertures and counterforms. The entire family feels very legible when used to set text. Hind Mysuru’s Kannada and Latin script components are scaled in relation to each other so that multi-script texts will sits nicely alongside each other. Since Hind Mysuru’s Kannada characters are monolinear, they have a nice, fresh feeling, and appear very modern.

Aside from the Latin glyphs, each of the five Hind Mysuru fonts has 444 Kannada glyphs, including many unique conjuncts. These ensure full support for the writing of the Kannada language. The Latin script’s character set is Adobe Latin 3, enabling the typesetting of English and other Western European languages.

Hind Mysuru is a solid alternate when choosing typefaces for UI design, and a wise selection for electronic display embedding. Manushi Parikh designed Hind Mysuru for ITF, who first published the fonts in 2015. Hind Mysuru is named after Mysuru, a city in Karnataka, India.

The Hind Mysuru project is led by Indian Type Foundry, a type design foundry based in Ahmedabad, India. To contribute, see github.com/itfoundry/hind-mysuru