Abstract/Summary

Fiona Ross and John Hudson (co-designers) were commissioned by Harvard University Press to design an original typeface in the Kannada script for the prestigious Murty Classical Library of India series. In line with other specially commissioned Indian-script typeface designs for this project, the brief was to provide high-quality readable type that would render the classics accessible to a wide readership world-wide, i.e. to young readers as well as scholars of Indian literature. Murty Kannada has been first employed in the publication of Raghavanka’s text The Life of Harishchandra (HUP, 2017). Underpinned by Ross’s research and practice, the design takes inspiration from a range of sources: the crisp open counters of the eighteenth-century types of the renowned Basel Mission Press; the styling of ligatures in the 1930s Kannada types offered by the Gujarat Type Foundry; and the treatment of specific forms and dynamic stroke angles of other unattributed types found in a twentieth-century Kannada Reader. Murty Kannada is a robust design that, whilst avoiding the extreme high-contrast style of earlier designs, adheres to the now customary patterns of Kannada stroke modulation to ensure good readability for all sizes.