Abstract/Summary

Fiona Ross and John Hudson (co-designers) were initially commissioned by Harvard University Press in 2012 to design original text typefaces to represent South Asian languages in print to answer the needs of the forthcoming Murty Classical Library of India (MCLI) book series that first appeared in 2015 (see https://www.murtylibrary.com/about/design-and-typography). In 2019 Google Fonts commissioned extended and updated versions of the Murty fonts through Tiro Typeworks to be published as open-source fonts to offer users traditional text typefaces suitable for a variety of uses in print and on screen. This commission resulted in the Tiro Indic collection co-designed by Hudson and Ross which comprises the following fonts: Bangla (Bengali), Devanagari (separate fonts for Hindi, Marathi, and Sanskrit), Gurmukhi (for Panjabi language), Kannada, and Telugu. A Tamil font designed by Fernando Mello and Fiona Ross is also included. These fonts exemplify research-based practice: utilising archival research, knowledge of typographic practices, and extensive design experience in this field. In developing the new typefaces, each script presented different design challenges to achieve an accurate typographic representation that would cohere with all the type-face designs created for the Murty Library. For the Tiro Indic collection, the Murty fonts were rigorously reviewed, revised if necessary, and extended to cater for contemporary user’s needs beyond those required for setting literary texts. Each Tiro Indic font is in a single weight with the addition of a new italic companion; each also contains a Latin-script component, Castora, possessing a full complement of transliteration marks for South Asian languages. The extensions were created with the assistance of Paul Hanslow, Neelakash Kshetrimayum, and Kaja Słojewska; all were produced by Tiro Typeworks. An accompanying article relating some of the research undertaken was published alongside the release of the fonts in June 2022. https://design.google/library/new-Indic-fonts/.