Kalam

Try Kalam

Weights and styles

• Light 300Kalam Light
• Regular 400Kalam Regular
• Bold 700Kalam Bold

About Kalam

Kalam is a handwriting typeface for two scripts, Devanagari and Latin. The letters lean sharply to the right and look as if written quickly with a thin felt-tip or ballpoint pen: strokes are even, ends are rounded, and the Latin letters stay unconnected. Although the forms come from everyday handwriting, the fonts were tuned for text on screen. The Indian Type Foundry first published the family in 2014; Lipi Raval designed the Devanagari and worked with Jonny Pinhorn on the Latin. There are three weights, Light, Regular and Bold, as static files, with no separate italic. Each font holds 1,027 glyphs, a large share of them Devanagari conjuncts, while the Latin part covers Western European languages and, through the Latin Extended set, languages such as Polish, Czech and Turkish. Version 2.001, from July 2015, improved the OpenType features.

Where Kalam works

Handwritten notes in an interface

Tuned for screens, Kalam can set comments, tips or sticky-note style callouts next to a regular text face.

Devanagari and English together

Both scripts were drawn as one design, so a bilingual card or poster keeps the same pen stroke throughout.

Greeting cards and invitations

The fast, slanted writing gives names and short messages a personal tone.

Emphasis within handwriting

Light, Regular and Bold allow a heading and a note in the same hand, which most handwriting fonts cannot do.

Captions on social media graphics

Bold 700 stays visible when a short caption is placed over a photo.

Glyphs

Language support

The family contains the core letters these languages are written with:

• English
• French
• German
• Spanish
• Portuguese
• Italian
• Dutch
• Swedish
• Norwegian
• Danish
• Finnish
• Icelandic
• Catalan
• Turkish
• Polish
• Czech
• Slovak
• Hungarian
• Romanian
• Croatian
• Slovenian
• Lithuanian
• Latvian
• Estonian

Writing systems with glyphs in the family besides Latin: Devanagari. These are listed as scripts, not as a promise for every language written in them.

Character sets found in the files: devanagari, latin, latin-ext. The language list is a check of required letters against the font, not a promise of typographic quality in each language.

License

Fonts that pair with Kalam

Suggestions come from simple rules on the records: a contrasting classification and enough weights to carry body text. They are a starting point, not a verdict.

Use Kalam on the web

Download the family and host the files on your own site, then declare them in CSS. Please do not link to the files on trendhub.net: preview files here are subsets and their addresses change.

@font-face {
  font-family: "Kalam";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Kalam-Bold.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 700;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Kalam";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Kalam-Light.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 300;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Kalam";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Kalam-Regular.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 400;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}

body {
  font-family: "Kalam", cursive;
}

Or load it from the official source. Google Fonts serves Kalam with this markup:

<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.googleapis.com">
<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.gstatic.com" crossorigin>
<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Kalam:wght@300;400;700&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">

Things to know

No italic

Kalam is already slanted by design. The family has upright files only, in three weights.

Static files

Kalam is not a variable font; Light, Regular and Bold are separate files.

Scripts covered

The character sets are Devanagari, Latin and Latin Extended. Cyrillic, Greek and Vietnamese are not included.

FAQs

Similar fonts

Other families in the same classification, ordered by shared use tags. All handwriting fonts