Hind Kochi is a family of five Malayalam 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 Malayalam, the Hind Kochi 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 both open apertures and very open counterforms. The entire family feels very legible when used to set text. Hind Kochi’s Malayalam and Latin script components are scaled in relation to each other so that multi-script texts will sit nicely alongside each other. Like many other Malayalam typefaces, Hind Kochi’s characters are monolinear. But the specific design features added to Hind Kochi’s Malayalam features give text set in that language a nice, fresh feeling, with a very modern appearance.

Each font in the Hind Kochi family has 530 glyphs, which includes all of the characters needed to write Malayalam. The Latin character set is Adobe Latin 3, enabling typesetting for English and other Western European languages. Hind Kochi is a solid alternate when choosing typefaces for UI design, and a wise selection for electronic display embedding. Dhruvi Tolia designed Hind Kochi for ITF, who first published the fonts in 2015. Hind Kochi is named after Kochi, a city in Kerala, India.

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