A decade ago, Bangla graphic designers faced a significant limitation: they had access to only a handful of typefaces, which constrained their ability to create varied and visually compelling designs in the language.
The landscape changed dramatically with the launch of Lipighor, a Bangla font foundry established to fill this gap by consistently publishing a diverse range of Bangla Unicode and ASCII fonts.
Lipighor not only provided designers with new, high-quality typefaces but also fostered a growing community around Bangla typography.
With over 400 fonts and more than two crore downloads, Lipighor has become a vital resource for designers and creatives across the Bengali-speaking world, enabling a deeper cultural expression through typography.
While font foundries like Bongolipi and Priyofont are tirelessly working to improve the Bangla fonts collection, Lipighor is leading the way.
What is Lipighor?
In 2018, two designers—Nurul Islam Ador from Dhaka and Niladri Shekhar Bala from Kolkata—came together to establish Lipighor.
Their goal was to enrich the Bangla font library. The duo connected on social media while exploring Bangla typography, and their shared passion gave rise to Lipighor, which has since released over 400 fonts and reached more than two crore downloads.
Today, Lipighor also offers its own Bangla keyboard called "Keyman."
Story of Alinur Islam
Lipighar’s managing director Alinur Islam told Dhaka Tribune that he started his journey with Lipighar as an admirer.
At the time of Lipighor’s founding, he was just starting his design career using an Android smartphone.
Many of the design applications he used allowed custom fonts, sparking his interest in typography.
Curious about the creators behind these fonts, Alinur joined Lipighor’s fan club and eventually connected with the founders and designers.
By the end of 2018, he joined the team as an in-house designer, publishing his first font, “Ekush,” soon after.
Remarkably, Alinur started designing typefaces on his Android phone.
"There are several apps available on the Play Store; that’s where I started," he explained, adding that his early designs involved drawing letters directly on a touchscreen.
Alinur said: “I did have the idea that sketching on paper can be a method of designing fonts. As I did not have anything except an Android phone, I started designing typefaces there.”
With guidance from Taufiqur Rahman and Niladri Shekhar Bala, Alinur honed his skills in structuring and shaping letters. One of his typefaces, “Proyash,” was even created entirely on his phone.
Alinur said: “The design of a font can start anywhere, whether it is on a sketchbook or phone, but the letters need to be vectorised to become a font.”
Designing a Font
Designing a font can begin anywhere—a sketchbook, a touchscreen, or even inspired by sources like old newspapers, wall art, or books.
To design a font from a sketchbook, first, one needs to draw all the letters by hand. Then, it needs to be scanned and vectorized by using software.
A designer can get the concept of a font in various ways. Old newspapers, wall art, books, or typewriters inspired designers to create fonts. Beyond that, inspiration for a design can come from one’s own creativity.
Alinur’s font, “Bohubrihi,” was inspired by the shape of the Bangla letter ‘No’ (ন).
Depending on the complexity of the concept, fonts can take anywhere from a day to several weeks to complete; Alinur’s quickest design took just 36 hours, while his longest took 15 days.
Most designers use the pen tool in Adobe Illustrator to vectorize the letters before inputting them into a font editor.
“Building and designing fonts are two different things. A template is required if one needs to build a font from scratch. It requires coding knowledge,” said Alinur.
To ease the process, Lipighor created a template for Bangla fonts.
Alinur said: “To design a font, one needs to understand two things. They are the shape and visual space of a letter.”
If a designer wants to publish a font on Lipighor, the person has to follow a chart of Bangla vowels, consonants, short depictions (i.e. aa-kar, ro-fola), joint letters, numbers and punctuations provided by them.
A Bangla font needs around 500 shapes to be complete. However, a font designer does not need to provide all of them to be published on Lipighor. The foundry will design the rest of the shapes accordingly.
Designers earn up to Tk15,000 for each font published on the platform.