*ARCHIVED DOCUMENT*


# fontfund

The fontfund is–as the name suggests, a collective fund to finance development of fonts for Sri Lanka. The fund will finances development and distribution of Sinhala, Tamil and Latin script fonts, font related tools and resources. s a ances and facilitates development of fonts for Sri Lanka. The Foundry will focus on developing, designeing, incubating and distributing fonts. The project will run as a not for profit programme and will launch in and distribution of twenty free and Opensource Sinhala, Tamil and Latin script fonts within 2019–2022.

This is preliminary proposal and a concept paper.

## Why
We have a lack of fonts in Sri Lanka. Specially fonts that have a matching Sinhala Tamil and Latin are extremely rare. There are only around 100 Sinhala fonts out there, made by passionate and enthusiastic hobbyists. While these fonts are being used widely in the advertising and communications industries the quality engineering is way lower than industry standard.

We need more fonts; not just any fonts, well engineers, well designed fonts made for the future technologies. So there is a demand, why isn’t there a supply?

The font making process is a higely time consuming and specilised area. And making fonts for Sinhala is particulary time consuming comapred to other scripts, due to higer number of charchter combinations. Typeface design and font enginnering requiers skills and knowledge across culture, langauge, technology and aesthetics. All this makes producing fonts for Sinhala and Tamil a sizeble investment for a font maker. But is there a way to get a good return on investment?

At the last survey carried out by Akuru Collective 15 people who identified as having made sinhala fonts. However only 2 of them considerd it thier career or prfeesions and only one of them actually practice making fonts on daily basis.

But why not just go the traditional way and encourage companies.

Akuru Collective is committed to improving typographic in the region and expect

Sinhala Tamil and Latin fonts that are developed to work together is not enough and these fonts are being made into stuff

Fonts are infrastructure to the design process and lack of fonts is one of the main challenges we as desginers.

## Focus area
Fund will invest in following areas;
- Font development and maintainance (Sinhala, Tamil and English fonts)
- Reserch and knowledge development in type design and typography

- Additional objectives;
- Skill development programmes
- Support extra

## Operations

- A project manager will be hired to manage the projects and funds
- Proejcts should be either 3 months or 6 months long
- Working groups will evaluate proposals or prepare and suggest proejcts
- Research working group
- Fonts working groupct manager will be hired to manage the projects and funds
- Font proejcts should be either three month or six month long.
- Proposals passed through the WGs will be approved by members on voting platform
- Voting and review of projects will happen every 3 months
- Online voting useing Loomio platform

### Advisory committee

- An advisory commitee will be appointed from a range of diciplines and industries to help and advice

## Fundraising

### Fontlet subscriptions

Memberships are annual subscription to the following value additions.

- Instant acsess to latest fonts and updates to exsisting fonts
- Vote for proposed font projects and future investments through our online platform
- Propose new font projects
- Prority support and fixes to font related issues
- All fonts will be available as being developed
- Early acsess to new font proejcts
- FontCase app for managing the font library
- Free membership to Akuru Collective
- fonts.app for managing the font library

There are two membership categories *personal* & *organizational.*

#### Peronal membership *(40 USD/yr | 3000 LKR/yr )*

#### Organizational membership - PLATINUM *(500 USD/yr)*
- For small and medium orgnisations
- Five votes per membership
- Install fonts on any number of computers without restrictions

### Sponsorship (one time payment )
- A selected set of fonts from our catalogue will be available for sponsorships
- Sponsoring organisation's logos will be incorporated into the select fonts
- Acsess the fonts with open type features (You can type 'logo.mybrand' and your logo will appear replacing the text.)
- Our most used benchmark font proejcts such as Abhaya Libre, Stick No Bills and other fonts can be used.

- Logo on our sponsors list

### Major sponsorship (one time payment)
- Orgnisations can sponsor a development of a complete font and the particular font will be named after the contributing orgnisation.
- Thier logo will be included in all fonts free of charge.

## Action plan

| | | |
| -------- | -------- | -------- |
| **PHASE 1** | | Evaluation and setting up |
| | | Inducting founding memebers |
| | | 10 fonts will be available |

| | | |
| -------- | -------- | -------- |
| **PHASE 2** | | Launch |
| | | Inducting more members |
| | | Opening personal memberships |
| | | Launching the desktop app |
| | | Setting up the font development teams|

| | | |
| -------- | -------- | -------- |
| **PHASE 3** | | Start 10 new font projects |
| | | Acquiring more fonts |
| | | Opening personal memberships |
| | | Launching the desktop app |
| | | Setting up the font development teams|

| | | |
| -------- | -------- | -------- |
| **PHASE 3** | | Start 10 new font projects |
| | | Acquiring more fonts |
| | | Opening personal memberships |
| | | Launching the desktop app |
| | | Setting up the font development teams|

## Who

The Lanka Type Foundry proejct is an initiative by Akuru Collective and Mooniak. Proejct supported by an independent project governed by the members based on the votes and will operate funds in an annual basis.

Founding members;
- [Mooniak](http://mooniak.com/)
- [LeafyCode](https://leafycode.com/)
- Join as a founding member

The plan is to work with bussinesses and other organisations that benefit from better multilingual typography to contribute to the fund.