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 Hindi typeface design, initiated by Kshetrimayum and Ross and developed by Vaibhav Singh with their consultation, is the second of these to be published and was launched live in May 2023. ABPN Hindi is the first Devanagari-script typeface to be specifically designed for broadcast news. The brief was to accord with the newly designed logos and taglines previously 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 (released in December 2022), was to create a typeface that would render the Hindi language in the Devanagari script – which includes some complex forms – accurately and clearly within the moving ticker-tape live news stream that appears across the bottom of viewers’ different screens. Designed to optimise functionality in the screen environment, ABPN Hindi design comprises a robust, low-contrast typeface with generous counters and humanist, rather than geometric, traits. This design approach, as in the case of ABPN Bengali and other typefaces undertaken for this project, ensures the type-forms retain their clarity when reversed as white text, or displayed in colour, as can be seen in the ABP News and ABP Ganga news channels. The design consists of three weights, Light, Regular and Bold, of over 650 characters per font; font production was undertaken by Tiro Typeworks.