Kumar One

Kumar is a series of matching Open Source display fonts. They each support the Gujarati and Latin scripts. The two Kumar fonts may be used together, or entirely on their own.

Kumar One Outline is a vertical-contrast design, in which both the downstrokes as well as the left and right-hand sides of each letterform are built up out of two parallel lines and the whites space in-between them. The upstrokes and typeface’s horizontals are just thin, single lines.

Kumar One itself fills in all of the thicker empty spaces in the downstrokes/horizontals, offering letterforms that are very dark and full of contrast.

The Kumar design is made entirely out of straight lines; all elements that would usually be drawn with soft curves are faceted, built up out of several shorter straightened-out elements. Text in either Kumar font shimmers like a jewel; the effect of both fonts is quite decorative.

The Gujarati and Latin script components are scaled in relation to each other so that the Gujarati base characters are 85% as tall as the Latin uppercase. Text set in the Gujarati script sits nicely alongside the Latin lowercase, too. Kumar’s Gujarati vowel marks are all single-line, rather than double-line. Indeed, Kumar’s Gujarati is a very unique design; there are simply no other options like it currently available!

Each of the Kumar fonts has 870 glyphs, including hundreds of unique Gujarati conjuncts. The Latin component’s character set is an extended one, which enables typesetting in English and the other Western, Central, and Eastern European languages. Parimal Parmar designed Kumar for Indian Type Foundry in 2016.

The Kumar project is led by Indian Type Foundry, a type design foundry based in Ahmedabad, India. To contribute, see github.com/itfoundry/kumar