Lipighor: Inside the largest foundry of Bangla fonts

In 2018, two young men – Niladri Shekhar Bala from West Bengal and Nurul Alam Ador from Bangladesh – met in a Facebook group. They soon found a common interest in the lack of Bangla fonts. 

They devoured the subject and, consequently, undertook a mission of establishing a Bangla font-making company to produce a variety of new and aesthetically pleasing fonts for Bangla language users. They named the company Lipighor. 

"They [the founders] took up the challenge because they found that there are thousands of English fonts on the internet. But if you look at the Bangla font, there isn't [a wide range of] a variety of fonts in Bangla fonts," said Alinur Islam, the managing director of Lipighar Private Limited. 

Over the last five years, Lipighar provided Bangla language users with 221 Bangla fonts. Most of them are free to download. They also make high-end fonts for its customers.  The company has developed four keyboard layouts which are also free to download.  

Lipighor's senior management has encouraged many young designers to create new typefaces so that the next generation may contribute to the creation of new fonts. Amongst them is Alinur Islam, Lipighor's current managing director.       

Alinur stumbled on Lipighor in 2018. He used to run a Facebook page and, as a hobby, used to write using his smartphone. "At that time, there were only a handful of Bangla fonts for smartphones," recalled Alinur, who downloaded new Bangla fonts and felt inspired to develop newer ones. 

"It was a different type of feeling. I cannot [quite] express my feelings," Alinur told The Business Standard.    

One day Alinur came across Lipighor's initiative of setting up a fan club whose members will get three new fonts in a month before the font is released.  The membership was 200 taka and the fonts would include one premium quality and two general fonts. 

After becoming a member, Alinur met with the top management of the company and some font designers and developers. But, soon Lipighor announced that it would close the club for some issues. 

This is when Alinur met with its co-founder Niladri Shekhar Bala and Sharif Uddin Shishir and asked Niladri whether he could design fonts using his mobile phone. In response, Niladri encouraged Alinur to try and suggested some apps that he thought might have been useful to Alinur.

After working on a project for around three months, Alinur tried to design a typeface. He showed them to Lipighor and they said that it would work. But they also said that it would take time to perfect it since Alinur made it using mobile phones instead of a laptop or computer.  

He had just sat for his secondary school certificate exam; afterwards, he was admitted into Rangpur Ideal Institute of Technology.  

Lipighor's support encouraged Alinur. He had such a strong urge to design fonts that in a single year, Alinur designed 12 typefaces with his mobile phone. Niladri Shekhar Bala and Toufiqur Rahman used to help him online too. 

Alinur arrived in Dhaka before the Covid-19 lockdown in Bangladesh and was accepted into Kazi Nazrul Govt College Dhaka to study Arabic literature. During the lockdown, he had to go back home to Kurigram and got to spend more time designing typefaces for Bangla fonts. 

Later, Lipighor offered Alinur a job as an in-house typeface designer with a monthly salary of Tk10,000. 

Alinur's family is not that rich and the family considers buying a laptop a luxury. When a laptop became essential, Alinur bought a laptop for Tk68,000. His farmer father gave him Tk38,000 and Alinur took out a loan and he exhausted all his savings to make the purchase. 

In 2021, Alinur finally managed to buy a laptop. He was so obsessed with fonts that he did not do anything but design fonts. Alinur's first font Alinur21 font was released in the same year.

In 2022, the company suffered a blow as one of the top management officials resigned and took some typeface designers with him. At the same time, Toufiqur Rahman resigned from the post of managing director. And amidst the reshuffle, Alinur was offered the managing director's role one afternoon. 

Although Alinur did not quite feel ready to take on such a responsibility, he eventually did. 

Lipighor has so far released more than 220 fonts. Of them, Alinur alone designed the highest number of 72 fonts. 

How Lipighor runs the business 

Though Lipighor was set up to provide varieties of free fonts, the company found it hard to run the foundry on the revenue generated by Google AdSense. In the past, they would put more emphasis on the free fonts. However, for the last few months, they're putting more emphasis on the Premium fonts to sustain the business and keep the font typeface designers and font developers on the payroll.

The company generates income in two ways. One is the sale of premium (for Tk100 each) and freemium (at a price of Tk20 each) fonts. For freemium, the buyers will get the basic alphabet of the Bangla fonts. They will not get the compound alphabets.  

And the other way is Google AdSense (generated money). Alinur Islam said that the monthly revenue of the foundry is between Tk3,000 and Tk9,000. 

On the other hand, the company buys a typeface design from designers for Tk5,000. The typeface designers get Tk2,000 at the time of the release of the font. The designers get the rest of the Tk3,000 when the download of the font crosses the 50,000 mark. 

For a premium font, Lipighar provides the typeface designer Tk15,000 in seven instalments. 

However, the job is a tall order. Alinur believes that an average skilled person needs around 10 days to design a typeface and it takes five days to develop a font from the typeface.

Besides freelance typeface designers, Niladri Shekhar Bala, Nurul Alam Ador and Alinur Islam design typefaces for the Lipighor. Around 40 font developers including the staff and freelancers work for Lipighor. 

Lipighor's most downloaded font is designed by HM Mahfuz. The font has been downloaded more than 4,90,000 times. 

Despite Alinur's intense passion for designing typefaces, he says it is a road less travelled. He added that it does not pay much or enough to run a family. 

Lipighor is looking to add more and more varieties of fonts. At the same time, the company is working on making a mobile keyboard with the Bangla alphabet.    

However, there is a problem too. They sell a font for a single person to use. But, some people buy these fonts and sell them in different groups on Telegram.