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 Marathi typeface design, initiated by Kshetrimayum and Ross, was developed by Vaibhav Singh with their consultation. It was published alongside its sister Devanagari-script typeface ABPN Hindi and launched live in May 2023. As with ABPN Hindi, the brief for ABPN Marathi 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 design 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 was to create a typeface that would render the Marathi language in the Devanagari script – which enjoys the use of complex and vertically stacked forms – accurately and clearly within the moving ticker-tape live news-stream that appears across the bottom of viewers’ different screens. Extensive research was therefore conducted into the typographic preferences for the on-screen rendering of Marathi-specific consonants and consonantal clusters (conjuncts) which would resonate with today’s readers. ABPN Marathi comprises a robust, low-contrast typeface with generous counters and humanist traits that is designed to optimise functionality in the screen environment. This design approach, as in the case of 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 Majha news channel. The design consists of three weights, Light, Regular and Bold, of over 650 characters per font; font production was undertaken by Tiro Typeworks.