Akurucon 2018; Dutch–Ceylon Typographic Heritage Project
Knowledge exchange exploring shared typographic heritage between Sri Lanka and the Netherlands.
In August 2018, we set out to do something that had never been done in Sri Lanka quite this way before — to bring together designers, researchers, linguists, and type enthusiasts to examine a chapter of our typographic history that had long been overlooked. The result was a multi-day programme that spanned research seminars, archival exploration, intensive workshops, and the inaugural AkuruCON conference. It was one of the most meaningful projects I have worked on, and it began, as most meaningful things do, with a question: what happened to the letterforms the Dutch left behind?
The Historical Context
The Dutch Government Press in Ceylon was one of the most prominent printing enterprises in the region during the 18th century. Established in Colombo, it was capable of printing in Dutch, Sinhala, Tamil, and Burmese — an extraordinary multilingual operation for its time. In 1737, it produced the first ever Sinhala typeface, designed by Gabriel Schade, and printed what is recognised as the first modern Sinhala printed page. The press went on to pioneer early typography for both Sinhala and Tamil scripts, playing a regional role that extended well beyond Ceylon’s borders.
What makes the Dutch press typographically significant is not just the fact of its existence, but the way it navigated the transition from a script tradition rooted in ola-leaf manuscripts — where letterforms were drawn with a stylus — to the rigid constraints of metal type composition. The introduction of printing meant adapting Sinhala letterforms to an entirely new medium, and the Dutch press did this with a degree of cultural sensitivity that is often overlooked. While it introduced Western typographic conventions such as word spaces, hyphenation, and indentation, it also retained the Sinhala numeral system and continued using traditional Sinhala punctuation marks in keeping with classical standards. The result was a genuinely hybrid typographic style — one that solved a novel problem thoughtfully, rather than simply imposing one tradition onto another.
Despite its historical importance, this chapter of Sri Lanka’s typographic heritage remains underresearched and underappreciated in conversations about the Dutch-Ceylon relationship. The cultural and economic legacies of that era are frequently discussed; the typographic legacy almost never is. This project was an attempt to change that.
The Project
The project was conceived and proposed by me through the Akuru Collective, in collaboration with Mooniak, and carried out with the generous support of the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Sri Lanka and AOD Colombo. It was structured around three interconnected strands: a research and development programme, a knowledge exchange series, and the inaugural AkuruCON conference.
The research strand focused on producing a digital archive of printed material from the Dutch Press in Ceylon, developing a Sinhala font based on the original Dutch Press types, and creating a prototype and brief for a multiscript Sinhala, Tamil, and Latin font family drawing from those same historical sources. To support the type revival work, we photographed over 20 books produced by the Dutch Press, capturing macro-level detail of the original letterforms — detail fine enough for type designers to accurately reproduce the shapes digitally. Archival material was sourced from institutions including the Angus Library and Archive in Oxford and the National Archives of Sri Lanka.
The font that emerged from this work — the Galle font — was a digital revival of the original Sinhala typefaces designed by Gabriel Schade and his successors at the Dutch Press. Released at AkuruCON 2018 as an open-source font for public use and study, it was downloaded over 1,000 times and has since appeared in a range of projects. It was designed with the understanding that while the original Dutch Press types served as both title and body text faces in their time, the proportions and aesthetics of those letterforms are now most naturally suited to display, title, and decorative use in contemporary contexts. The goal was to remain true to the original aesthetic — preserving the distinctive tone of voice of the Dutch Press type — while producing something usable in modern environments, from web and mobile interfaces to print.
The project also produced a research paper on native Tamil typography of the Dutch Press in Ceylon, an area that had received virtually no attention from a typographic perspective. A prototype Tamil font based on the Dutch Press types was developed as part of this work.
The Programme
The knowledge exchange programme ran from 29 August to 1 September 2018 in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and was structured across four days of programming ranging from invite-only research sessions to a large public conference.
Day 1 — 29 August: Research Seminars
The opening day was dedicated to a research seminar on the typography of the Dutch Press in Ceylon, drawing 12 participants for the first session and 15 for the second, invite-only archival exploration session. This was the research core of the programme — examining archive material, studying the printed work of the Dutch Press, collecting samples, and working through the documentation that would inform the typeface revival project. It was a quiet, concentrated day of the kind that makes everything else possible.
Day 2 — 30 August: Studio Sessions
The second day moved into studio territory, with two studio sessions attended by 12 and 6 participants respectively. These sessions included talks covering the Dutch Press in Ceylon and its typography, an introduction to the Dutch Press type revival project by Textual, and a presentation by Martin Majoor on the last Dutch telephone directory — a case study in how he approached the design of Telefont, an exclusive typeface created specifically for that project in 1994. Practical work on the typeface project continued alongside these presentations.
Day 3 — 31 August: Martin Majoor Workshop and Talk
The third day was the most hands-on for participants, centred on Dutch type designer Martin Majoor and his celebrated Double Pencil Method — a type design workshop that drew 20 participants and offered direct training in working with historical letterform material, type design research, and Dutch typographic tradition. The day also included Majoor’s talk on type design philosophy, which explored his career-long inquiry into how serif and sans-serif typefaces can coexist in the same family — a search that eventually produced his approach to unified, large-scale type families. This talk drew 53 participants.
Martin Majoor (b. 1960) is one of the most respected type designers working today. He designed Scala (1990), the first serious text face published by FSI FontShop International, followed by Scala Sans (1993), Seria (2000), Nexus (2004), and Questa (2010–2015). His work on the Dutch telephone directory, for which he designed both the typography and the Telefont typeface, remains a landmark case study in functional, large-scale type design. He has lectured at conferences in Paris, San Francisco, Barcelona, The Hague, Berlin, Prague, Warsaw, Stockholm, Seoul, Madrid, and Dublin, and has contributed to numerous books and publications on typography. Bringing him to Colombo as the resource person for this programme was central to the knowledge exchange at the heart of the project.
Day 4 — 1 September: AkuruCON
The fourth and final day was AkuruCON — the inaugural annual conference on typography in Colombo, held publicly and attended by 121 participants in the workshops and 92 at the evening presentations. AkuruCON brought together designers, linguists, letterform enthusiasts, and researchers for what was, for the first time in Sri Lanka, a research-focused design conference dedicated to typography and script culture.
The conference featured workshops on typography and calligraphy running through the day, and an evening of presentations centred on Dutch and Sri Lankan typographic history, with a keynote by Martin Majoor. The day also included a studio session in which Majoor worked with the team to develop an initial brief and roadmap for the Dutch Sinhala–Tamil typeface revival project — a collaborative design planning exercise that produced the design direction documents that continue to guide the ongoing revival work.
Majoor’s third lecture during the programme — History of Sans-Serifs — explored the origins of sans-serif typefaces from their absence in the metal type tradition of 1450 all the way to their emergence around 1850 and their eventual dominance in contemporary typography.
Reach and Impact
The programme engaged over 250 unique participants across all events. More than 100 students from five design schools registered, with a large portion taking part in the workshop programme. The Galle font was downloaded over 1,000 times following its release and has been used in projects across Sri Lanka and beyond. Coverage from media outlets and engagement from the advertising and design community helped extend the project’s reach further. All workshops and sessions were documented and edited into video content.
Perhaps most significantly, AkuruCON established a community. It brought together, for the first time under one roof, a cross-disciplinary group of practitioners who care about typography, script culture, and the intersection of design and heritage — and it created the infrastructure for ongoing conversations that continue well beyond the event itself.
Organisers and Partners
Akuru Collective — Conceptualised and led the project.
Mooniak — Core collaborator and production partner.
AOD Colombo — Institutional support.
The Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Sri Lanka — Principal funder and partner.
Documentation Partners — Sense, Magic Monkeys Ceylon.
Technology Partner — LeafyCode, HostGrid.
Resource Person — Martin Majoor, type designer, The Netherlands.