ලංකා ෆොනුරූ සේවාව—ආරම්භක සාමාජිකත්වය

THIS PAGE IS IN ACTIVE WORK IN PROGRESS MODE. Subject to change till January 7th. If you are not interested in being an early contributor, please do not contribute.

Join us on our journey to build a sustainable fonts and design ecosystem in South Asia by reimagining authorship and ownership from the ground up. We're initiating a community to gather support for our ongoing efforts to address font scarcity in Sri Lanka. By allocating resources collaboratively with font users, designers, and stakeholders, we aim to create a more inclusive and accessible landscape for fonts and digital assets in the region.

Gain exclusive access to work-in-progress fonts, receive unique digital collectibles, and actively shape the future of Libre/Open source design culture and beyond.

Fonts are essential infrastructure enabling global communities to thrive in the digital age. It is our collective responsibility to empower communities to communicate, exchange knowledge, and express identities with ease and integrity. 

At Mooniak, we are dedicated to maintaining and developing fonts sustainably and collaboratively. After a decade of practice, research, and global collaborations in managing open-source font projects, Mooniak in collaboration with Akuru is launching a proof-of-concept community platform in 2025. Our long-term roadmap envisions a sustainable, open-culture-led design ecosystem for South Asia and global communities.

Building on lessons learned, we plan to establish a sustainable, community-owned commercial fonts ecosystem for the region using FLOSS licensing. Over the next five years, we aim to explore authorship and ownership grounded in open culture and Sri Lanka's economic realities.

With global insight and local roots, Mooniak has been producing multi-script fonts for Sinhala, Tamil, and English audiences since 2010. We specialize in open-source fonts, custom typeface design, logotypes, lettering, and editorial design, fostering a thriving community of letterform enthusiasts in Sri Lanka. Most of our work is published under Libre/Open source licenses.

Formally registered as a business in 2014 by Pathum Egodawatta, a type designer and font engineer, Mooniak pioneered Sinhala-Tamil multi-script typography, focusing on font development, documentation, and community building. Much of this work was self-funded through custom typeface projects, with additional support from organizations like Google Fonts and the Embassy of the Netherlands.

In 2015, Mooniak received funding from Google Fonts to create a set of Sinhala, Tamil, and Latin fonts, producing the first-ever web font families for these scripts. We developed tools, workflows, and research under open licenses, making this one of Sri Lanka's largest open-culture projects. Since 2016, we've focused on editorial design, multilingual typography awareness, and knowledge exchange.

Founded in 2017, the Akuru Collective is a grassroots initiative of typography enthusiasts fostering a vibrant typographic culture in Sri Lanka. Activities like Colombo Type Meetups and the 30 Days of Akuru project have brought together designers and enthusiasts to celebrate and innovate in Sinhala and Tamil letterforms.

In 2018, AkuruCon, Sri Lanka's first homegrown type conference, showcased calligraphy, lettering, typography, and font-making. Supported by the Department of National Archives and the Embassy of the Netherlands, it became a cornerstone for typographic discourse and innovation.

The collective has also embarked on projects like the "Galle Project," reviving colonial-era typefaces, and launched the Akuru Foundry to empower amateur type designers with tools to create and release Unicode-compliant fonts. Operating as a community cooperative, Akuru champions free and open-source fonts to democratize access to typographic resources.