Rickshaw Rong: A Free Bangla Font Painted in Dhaka Rickshaw Art, Before the Art Disappears

Short answer: Rickshaw Rong (রিকশা রং) is a free, open-source Unicode Bangla font whose every letter is painted in the style of Dhaka's rickshaw artists: red, yellow, green and blue enamel, flowers and vines, a black outline and a drop shadow. It is an OpenType-SVG colour font under the SIL Open Font License, so it is free for commercial work. Install it in Illustrator, Photoshop or InDesign, or type Bangla in the online generator and download a PNG for PixelLab, CapCut, Canva or Facebook. Download it from GitHub.

ঢাকার রিকশার পেছনের রংটা একদিন ফুরিয়ে যাবে। ব্যাটারি রিকশায় ক্যানভাস নেই, পেইন্টারদের কাজ নেই। রিকশা রং সেই রংটাকে কম্পিউটারে তুলে রাখল — ফ্রি, সবার জন্য, যাতে একটা সাইনবোর্ড, একটা বিয়ের কার্ড, একটা ইউটিউব থাম্বনেইলেও ঢাকা থাকে।

What rickshaw painting is, and why UNESCO put it on the heritage list

Look at the back of a cycle rickshaw in Old Dhaka. Film stars from the 1970s, a tiger in a jungle, the Taj Mahal, a mosque, a peacock, and a prayer or a joke in blazing letters. The painters work with enamel on tin and canvas, using colours chosen to survive monsoon sun. This is a living, commercial folk art, done by a few hundred craftsmen for the drivers who buy it, and it exists nowhere else.

In December 2023, at its 18th session, UNESCO's Intergovernmental Committee inscribed Rickshaws and rickshaw painting in Dhaka on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. It was Bangladesh's fifth inscription. The same UNESCO text adds the warning that matters: as motorised transport spreads, the number of rickshaws is falling, which "puts the practice of rickshaw painting under threat" and hits the livelihoods of the painters, especially the younger generation.

The threat is visible from any Dhaka street

Battery-powered rickshaws have no canvas to paint. Mass-printed vinyl is cheaper than a hand-painted panel. Dhaka's city corporations stopped issuing new pedal-rickshaw licences years ago. Reporting by The Daily Star, New Age and Dawn over the last decade tells the same story from the workshops: not enough painting work to feed a family, apprentices leaving, some masters emigrating for construction jobs in the Gulf.

A heritage listing does not pay a painter. What keeps an art alive is use. Rickshaw lettering used to be everywhere people looked. Now it is in exhibitions and on tote bags. We wanted to put it back where people write.

What Rickshaw Rong is

• A real Unicode Bangla font. Type with Avro, Google Keyboard or any phone keyboard. Conjuncts (ক্ষ, ন্ত, স্ব), vowel signs and reph shape correctly, because the letterforms and the Bangla shaping tables come from Ek Type's open-source Baloo Da 2.
• A colour font. Each glyph carries its own vector artwork in an OpenType-SVG table: outline, enamel fill, motifs, highlight and shadow. It stays sharp at any size.
• Free, including commercial use. SIL Open Font License 1.1. Posters, logos, packaging, videos, shop signs: all fine. The only thing you cannot do is sell the font file itself.
• Open source. The whole build pipeline is on GitHub, so anyone can improve a letter or build the next heritage font the same way.

How to use it in two minutes

No install, works on a phone. Open the Rickshaw Rong generator, type Bangla, press Download PNG. Tick "transparent" if you want to drop it onto a design in PixelLab, CapCut, Alight Motion, InShot or Canva. Those apps cannot render colour fonts, so a PNG is the right way in. The tool also exports SVG for Illustrator and copies the image straight to your clipboard.

Install the font (Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, Affinity). Download RickshawRong-Regular.otf. On Windows, right-click the file and choose Install. On Mac, double-click and choose Install Font. Restart the app. In Illustrator, turn on Preferences → Type → Show Indic Options once, and pick the Middle Eastern & South Asian composer in the Paragraph panel so Bangla shapes correctly. Colours show in Preview mode, not Outline mode. To recolour a letter, select the text and choose Type → Create Outlines: every letter splits into editable shadow, outline, fill and motif paths.

Where it will not show colour. Google Chrome, Microsoft Word, Canva and most phone apps do not support OpenType-SVG fonts. Use the generator for those.

How it was made, honestly

The letterforms are Baloo Da 2 ExtraBold, chosen because its heavy rounded strokes already look like signboard lettering and because its Bangla shaping is mature. We kept its shaping tables untouched and verified with HarfBuzz that every test word produces identical glyph sequences before and after.

For the painting, each letter's exact silhouette was handed to an image model (gpt-image-2) with one approved reference letter, and the model repainted the silhouette in rickshaw-art style. The results were traced back to vectors, aligned to the original glyph, and run through a shape check that measures how much of the real letter the painting covers and how much spills outside. Letters that drifted were re-rolled or re-fitted until every one passed. A person chose the style anchor and reviewed every batch. All 468 Bangla glyphs, including every letter, vowel sign, digit and conjunct, are painted this way.

We are saying this plainly because a heritage project should not pretend. No rickshaw painter painted these letters. The next version should change that: we want to pay a Dhaka rickshaw artist to paint a full set by hand and release it as its own font, with the artist's name on it.

What comes next, and how to be part of it

Rickshaw Rong is free because the colour belongs to everyone. The next fonts need the same months of work: Nakshi Kantha stitch lettering, Jamdani motifs, Patachitra, the hand-painted signboards of Old Dhaka.

If you use the font and it earns you a smile from a client, you can put the price of a cup of tea toward the next one at buymeacoffee.com/teamzlab. Every name goes into the repository's SPONSORS file permanently. If you run a company, a whole heritage font can carry your name; thousands of designers will use it daily. Write to [email protected].

Who made this

Teamz Lab is a UK-registered product studio run by Bangladeshi engineers. We build mobile apps, web products and brand systems for companies in Bangladesh, the UK and the Nordics, and we release cultural projects like this one in the open. If your brand wants a heritage campaign, a Bangla-first app, or a custom typeface with your name on it, write to [email protected] or see teamzlab.com.

FAQ

Is Rickshaw Rong a free Bangla font? Yes. SIL Open Font License 1.1, free for personal and commercial use.

Does it work in Canva, PixelLab or CapCut? Not as a font file. Type in the online generator and download a transparent PNG instead.

Is it Unicode or Bijoy? Unicode. Any Unicode Bangla keyboard works; Bijoy ASCII typing will not.

Why does the file weigh 26 MB? Every letter carries real vector motifs rather than a bitmap, so it stays crisp at poster size.

Can I change the colours? In Illustrator, yes: Create Outlines splits each letter into editable layers. In the generator you can change the background and export a transparent PNG.

Where is the source? github.com/Teamz-Lab-LTD/rickshaw-rong-bangla-font: font, per-letter SVGs, build scripts, and the sponsor list.

Sources: UNESCO inscription announcement, UNESCO: Rickshaw Painting, a Colourful Heritage of Bangladesh, The Daily Star: The Last Rickshaw Artists, Dawn: Dhaka's rickshaw art fades in motor age.

Cover photo: Hand-painted rickshaw art by Salma Akter Choity, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Cropped; the crop is shared under the same licence.