The featured designs on the 30 Days of Akuru social media pages and on the #30DaysOfAkuru hashtag show the range of creativity among Sri Lankan designers and typography enthusiasts as they engage with the challenge. For instance, this year, the chosen letter for day 3 of ‘30 Days of Akuru’ challenge is ‘Ba’ in the Sinhala script. One designer converts the letter into a snoozing cat (a play on the Sinhala word for cat: balalaa) while a few others depict the letter as an owl, riffing on the Sinhala word, bakamoona. Another designer takes the letter and imagines it as a typeface in the shape of a bicycle, the curve of the script a perfect visual complement to the curve of the Sinhala script.

On day four, participants in the challenge had to use the Tamil letter ‘Nee’ as the visual springboard for their designs – one designer expands on the Tamil word for blue (neela) to depict the letter through found objects against a blue seascape while another uses the curvature of the letter to incorporate a bloodshot, accusatory eye, improvising on the Tamil word ‘Nee’, which means ‘you’.

“Each year we focus on a different set of Sinhala and Tamil letterforms. Some of these letterforms are inspired by current trending topics. For example, in 2020 we gave the Sinhala letterform ‘ko’ as our special letter inspired by the pandemic situation. But we do not encourage our participants to follow any theme. They are free to design using any method and theme,” explains Chamodi Waidyathilaka, a graphic designer currently studying for her Masters in Germany and co-founder of the 30 Days of Akuru challenge and the Akuru Collective.

The first edition of 30 Days of Akuru attracted 1083 submissions from 148 participants. The 2021 edition drew 1,141 submissions from 131 participants. While the first edition focused only on Sinhala letterforms, the challenge expanded to Tamil in subsequent years. The challenge is run by a team of volunteers who sift through submissions every day, keep an eye out for plagiarism or adaptations (submissions cannot be modifications of existing fonts) and choose the submissions to showcase on their social media platforms.

30 Days of Akuru follows similar templates and guidelines of other creative challenges around writing, design and photography popular on social media. The challenge, guided by the Akuru Collective’s founding ethos, also offers a glimpse of an earlier version of the internet – open source and participatory – that is now less frequent or in danger of being edged out. Akuru Collective ensures that the

copyright remains with the designers – some of the designers who participated in the challenge have gone on to sell their designs or prints of their designs. Plans were also afoot after the second edition to see how designers who had consistently engaged with the challenge and demonstrated potential could be supported to develop typefaces but unfortunately had to be postponed because of COVID-19 and the subsequent economic and political crisis in Sri Lanka.

“The challenge raises the awareness about the need for typography, typography as an industry in Sri Lanka, and encourages people to contribute to the industry and come up with their own fonts. For 30 days, we see people coming up with amazing ideas and amazing concepts for type fonts,” says Malindi Jayathunga, Community Manager at the Akuru Collective.

While there are endless options for English typefaces, the options for Sinhala and Tamil typefaces remain limited. A good typeface combines readability, functionality and creativity and it is necessary that typeface developers in Sri Lanka are equipped with the systems and knowledge required to develop quality type faces. Further, with the industry moving towards Unicode fonts, there is a need to develop fonts which are Unicode compatible while simultaneously building the infrastructure for typeface development explains Malindi.

Why are typefaces important and why should people care about letterforms? Pathum Egodawatta, Convenor of the Akuru Collective in its early years, works as a type designer and font engineer and explains that the importance of typefaces lies in multiple cultural and functional dimensions.

Typefaces are visual signifiers of identity and culture – one of the first markers of being in a new country, he explains, are public signage and languages these signs are in. In Sri Lanka, language and type play vital roles in its history as decades-long war and violence have been cleaved along the lines of language and identity. In 2011, Sri Lanka shifted from the old Sinhala “Sri” numbers on licence plates to two English letters without much fanfare. But in the 1950s, the introduction of the Sinhala “Sri” letters on

vehicle licence number plates were an exacerbation of deepening language fault lines and tensions, notes Pathum. The introduction of new languages and types in signboards and sequence of language are also often visual indicators of cultural and economic shifts in the country.

“When we think about typography, we think about designing letters for various reading contexts. When you read a novel, it’s an immersive reading experience, right? You are relaxed and it’s long form reading. The process is completely different to when you’re reading a signage on the highway on your way down south, right? These reading conditions and that context is also completely different to reading a bus ticket in in a moving bus. The techniques of designing type, how they are tested and designed – all these things differentiate. So, these functionalities require different adjustments. And making fonts takes a lot of time and effort,” says Pathum. He noted, for example, that to test the configurations of a Sinhala font, designers needed to actually work on almost 530 different sequences of letters or glyphs.

Over the years, the Akuru Collective has worked to raise awareness about typography in Sri Lanka and encourage interest in typography. A part of the Unicode Consortium, Akuru Collective is entirely volunteer-run by type and design enthusiasts. In previous years, the group has organized conferences, events and conversations around design and typography in Sri Lanka. Akuru Collective has released five fonts through its font foundry and also has a wood type conservation project in collaboration with the W.A. Silva Museum – an ongoing project where the collective buys old wood types from printers or people who are selling them or destroying them and then cleans and restores them. The collective is currently working on creating multiple opportunities for local designers amidst the current economic situation.

 Details on how to participate and submission requirements for 30 Days of Akuru can be found on: https://letterslanka.wixsite.com/30daysofakuru

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