Roundo Font Family

Roundo is an Open Source font family that currently offers support for the Gurmukhi and Latin scripts. It is a geometric sans serif typeface, optimized for headlines and other on-screen display-sized text. Roundo’s Latin-script character set is made up of top-heavy letters; this reverse contrast is particularly visible in Roundo’s lowercase letters. The typeface’s lowercase also sports a nice hybridization of geometric sans and humanistic sans design features. Roundo’s capital letters, on the other hand, are more geometric. The theme of geometrization is taken to an extreme in the Gurmukhi character set; the Gurmukhi base characters are very geometric in their design, and appear to be constructed – or even to have been “engineered” on a drafting table.

The x-height of Roundo’s Latin lowercase is tall: this means that the design combines shorter capital letters with ascenders and descenders not long enough to distract the reader. The lowercase “a” takes a double-storey form, while the “g” is single-storey. Roundo’s ascenders are topped off with diagonal shears, adding dynamism to any text set with the typeface. All dots in the typeface – be they for punctuation or other marks – are round. The headline of Roundo’s Gurmukhi base characters falls just between Latin x-height and the tops of the Latin capital letters. The typeface’s Gurmukhi characters are a bit narrower in feeling that the Latin, offering users a high degree of space-savings.

Five font styles make up the initial Roundo release: Light, Regular, Medium, SemiBold, and Bold. Each font contains 544 glyphs. The Gurmukhi character set was designed by Namrata Goyal. The Latin is from Shiva Nallaperumal. Roundo was first published by the Indian Type Foundry in 2016.