Kalam
Type with Purpose
Good typography guides attention, improves understanding, and makes communication effortless.
The Anatomy of a Typeface
By FontSide · June 2026
Every typeface is a system of decisions — about stroke contrast, x-height, spacing, and rhythm. The best ones feel invisible: you stop seeing the letters and start hearing the voice behind them. That transparency is the hardest thing to design.
A high x-height opens up the counters and makes small text breathe. Tight tracking pulls a headline together; loose tracking gives a caption room to exhale. None of these choices are accidents — they are arguments about how reading should feel.
Uppercase
Lowercase
Numerals
Symbols
Configuration
Select the weights and styles you want to include in your project.
Weights
Package Manager
The recommended way to use fonts in modern web projects.
1. Install Package
pnpm add @fontsource/kalam2. Import in App
// Please select at least one weight and style3. CSS Usage
body {
font-family: "Kalam", cursive;
}Google Fonts CDN
Use Google's CDN to embed the fonts directly via HTML.
HTML <head>
<!-- Please select at least one weight and style -->Fontsource CDN
Skip the build step by adding this directly to your global CSS file.
Global CSS
/* Please select at least one weight and style */Background & Story
Kalam is a handwriting-style typeface supporting the Devanagari and Latin scripts. This is an Open Source font family first published by the Indian Type Foundry in 2014.
Even though Kalam's letterforms derive from handwriting, the fonts have each been optimised for text on screen. All in all, the typeface is a design that feels very personal. Like many informal handwriting-style fonts, it appears rather fresh and new when seen on screen or printed on the page. Kalam's letterforms feature a very steep slant from the top right to the bottom left. They are similar to letters used in everyday handwriting, and look like they might have been written with either a thin felt-tip pen, or a ball-point pen. In the Devanagari letterforms, the knotted-terminals are open, but some other counter forms are closed. Features like these strengthen the feeling that text set in this typeface has been written very quickly, in a rapid manner.
Kalam is available in three weights: Light, Regular and Bold. Each font contains 1,025 glyphs, which includes many unique Devanagari conjuncts. These ensure full support for the major languages written with the Devanagari script. The Latin component's character set is a basic western one, which enables typesetting in English and the other Western European languages. Lipi Raval and Jonny Pinhorn developed the family for ITF; Raval designed the Devanagari component while she and Pinhorn worked together on the Latin.
The Kalam project is led by Indian Type Foundry, a type design foundry based in Ahmedabad, India. To contribute, see github.com/itfoundry/kalam
Updated July 2015: Updated to v2.001 with improved OpenType features.
Tags & Moods
Subsets
Install
pnpm add @fontsource/kalamDesigned by
Indian Type Foundry
Links
License
OFL-1.1