Akaya-Kanadaka

Designers: Vaishnavi Murthy & Juan Luis Blanco

Akaya is a single weight experimental display typeface in Kannada, Telugu and Latin scripts. Akaya Kanadaka and
Akaya Telivigala are made as two separate font files which share a common Latin.

Language Support

Akaya Kanadaka supports the reformed Kannada character set. The language support therefore extends to contemporary Kannada and basic Sanskrit. The peculiarities of minority scripts that use the Kannada script in contemporary use, like Tulu and Konkani, are not yet supported fully and Akaya will be extended once they are accepted and updated.

Akaya's Latin supports Afrikaans, Basque, Breton, Catalan, Croatian (Latin), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Faroese, Finnish, French, Gaelic, Gagauz (Latin), German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Javanese (Latin), Kashubian, Kannada, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay (Latin), Moldovan (Latin), Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian (Latin), Sami (Northern, Inari & Lule), Serbian (Latin), Silesian, Sorbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Telugu, Turkish and Walloon.

About Akaya

Kannada and Telugu scripts trace their origins to the highly stylised Kadamba script. Over the following centuries, these scripts were patronised by successive dynasties who reinterpreted this script several times. These interpretations were increasingly pragmatic in nature, stripping off structural complications to a great degree.

This simplification was taken a step further by the early Christian missionaries who made the first lead types for these scripts. However, when they did this, they introduced a copperplate inspired stroke modulation to these characters which were largely monolinear in nature till then. The stroke modulations in these founts followed the horizontal axis. The letter shapes here were geometric and constructed. These early experiments by the missionaries remains the most widely accepted style and works well for text settings.

When one looks around the hand-written Telugu or Kannada landscape today, found on book titles, graffiti or propaganda notices, a recurring calligraphic style is evident. This appears quite distinct from the rigid, formal text styles. The letters’ shapes here are more fluid and proportions more generous. The stroke modulations and the diagonal stress echo Latin calligraphy and work well for both Kannada and Telugu scripts. Akaya is based on this lively hand-written style. This style was popularised in Karnatka by the renouned artist and calligrapher, Kamalesh. It is intesting to find a common style between these two scripts even after they have grown apart with their separate identities.

The letter-shapes for Akaya experimented with reverse ductus, where each character is written with its stroke direction reversed to add fluidity. The same principle and contrast angle is applied in Akaya Latin, depending on the structure of the letter. This is forms the basis for its characteristic shapes.

To contribute to this, please contact:

Vaishnavi for Kannada vaishnavimurthy@gmail.com
Juan for Latin juan@blancoletters.com

Acknowledgements

Google fonts & Dave Crossland for commissioning this font. Pria Ravichandran and Liang Hai for all the help with the feature files. Georg Seifert, Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer & Dunwich Type Founders for demistify the Glyphs.app.