Malayalam Unicode was still finding its feet in 2007. Swathanthra Malayalam Computing and K.H. Hussain had been building the foundations, fonts, rendering systems, the infrastructure that made Malayalam on computers possible. The fonts that existed were all for body text. Nothing for titles, nothing decorative.
A Google Summer of Code application went in to fill that gap. The original plan was to scan handwritten decorative letterforms, vectorize them, and build a font from that. The Rufscript experiment had already proved the basic process worked for Latin. Malayalam would be harder, but the approach seemed sound.
It wasn’t. Malayalam has over 900 glyphs. Getting decorative handwritten forms to render correctly across all of them was well beyond what the timeline allowed. The handwritten route had to be dropped.
Hussain sir guided the design toward a geometric approach instead. Rounded letterforms, bulged at the ends, drawn from the tradition of Malayalam cover lettering. The kind of type that appeared on book covers and film posters, before digital tools flattened everything into body fonts. That became the direction, and he led the process in a way that made it possible to follow and learn at the same time.
Dyuthi became the first decorative Unicode font for Malayalam. Published under SIL Open Font License, maintained by SMC, built for headlines and titles.
[font specimen]