Abstract/Summary

Fiona Ross was commissioned in 2020 by the renowned Kolkata publishing group Ananda Bazar Patrika (ABP) Private Ltd to lead a team of designers with Neelakash Kshetrimayum (Brand New Type) to design original Indian-script typefaces for ABP's newly acquired 7 broadcast news channels. The ABPN Bengali typeface, co-designed by Kshetrimayum and Ross with assistance from Juan Bruce, is the first of these to be published and was launched live on 11 December 2022. ABPN Bengali is the first Indian script typeface to be specifically designed for broadcast news. The brief was to accord with the newly designed logos and taglines also created by Kshetrimayum and Ross for the news channels, which were published in December 2020. Accordingly, the typeface designs needed to meet the same principal design criteria which entailed: achieving the appropriate styling for the context that speaks to all generations of readers; ensuring optimal readability at all sizes for accurate language representation; and maintaining the highest typographic quality standards. A key challenge in this research-led project, initiated by the ABPN Bengali design, was to create a typeface that would render the Bengali script, which possesses deep and complex character forms, accurately and clearly within the moving ticker-tape live news stream that appears across the bottom of viewers’ different screens. This modern design deliberately echoes that of ABP’s Sarkar typeface designed for newsprint (by Ross, Holloway, & Kshetrimayum) but for functionality in the screen environment ABPN Bengali has significantly different elements and proportions. It is a robust, low-contrast typeface with generous counters and humanist, rather than geometric, traits that enable the type-forms to retain their clarity when reversed as white text, or displayed in colour, as in the ABP Ananda news channel. A notable feature is that the design retains the traditional knots and spikes from the Bengali manuscript hand, which aid character recognition, and therefore readability, particularly in the case of moving text. The design comprises three weights, Light, Regular and Bold, of over 400 characters per font; font production was undertaken by Tiro Typeworks.