InDesign in India

This article appeared in Issue 128 of InDesign Magazine.

A review of publications created with InDesign using Indic scripts.

Ever since I was a child, I have been fascinated by the exotic and mysteriously connected characters that make up the ancient language of Sanskrit—usually written in a script called Devanagari. But Devanagari is just one of dozens of scripts that, together, are called Indic (or Brahmic) scripts—a collection of related “alphabets” used by dozens of languages, including Hindi, Sanskrit, Marathi, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu, Tibetan, Sinhala, Kannada, and Punjabi. They are among the most beautiful, flowing, calligraphic scripts in the world—read by more than a billion people, and yet rarely seen and used outside the Indian subcontinent (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Indic scripts span a wide variety of glyph styles.

Of course, we are all accustomed to seeing ads or documents written in Latin scripts (such as the so-called Romance languages, the Nordic languages, and hundreds more). Similarly, it’s common to see printed work in Chinese, Arabic, or even Cyrillic (Russian) characters. But we rarely see Indic scripts in professional design—which seems crazy, as Devanagari is the third most-common script in the world!

So this issue of InDesign Magazine is devoted to these amazing languages and writing systems. Let’s take a look at some of the marvelous work being done in these languages and created with Adobe InDesign.

One language, two scripts

You probably know that English and Chinese are the two most common languages spoken in the world. The third? Hindustani, which is spoken in both India

and Pakistan. Curiously, this language is written in two completely different scripts, depending on where you live. In India, the language is called Hindi and is written in the Devanagari script, from left to right. Across the border, it is called Urdu and written in Arabic, from right to left.

While there are a few small differences between the languages, the people of the two countries can almost always speak with each other—but they typically cannot read each other’s written language!

For example, the question, “Do you like tea?” sounds almost identical in Hindi and Urdu: kya aapako chaay pasand hai? But the written forms of this simple question are very different!

Hindi

Urdu

The Indic Difficulty

We cannot talk about these scripts and languages without first pointing out a fascinating irony: while parts of InDesign’s engineering team have been located in India for 20 years—and today the vast majority of InDesign development is done in India—InDesign itself is not yet widely used in India. Believe it or not, a huge number of designers on the Indian subcontinent still use PageMaker or CorelDraw as their primary tool.

The reasons for this are complicated. Some say a Creative Cloud subscription is simply too expensive for the huge number of independent freelancers that the publishing industry relies on (and PageMaker is far easier to pirate, of course). But another, more legitimate reason has to do with fonts. Indic script fonts often have complex contextual ligatures, requiring hundreds of individual character forms to be drawn. Unfortunately, most Indic script fonts are based on pre-Unicode encoding, and so each font has its own (often crazy!) character map—for example, the character/glyph you get when you press an “a” will be different depending on what font you use, and if you switch from one font to another, all the characters may change, and then the text would be completely unreadable.

Over the years, many designers in India have worked out very specific workflows with old fonts and old software that work for them, and changing to InDesign and newer, better Unicode fonts is a huge challenge.

This is one reason why Apurva Ashar created scripts that help people map old fonts to new ones. Ashar is the Executive Director of Cygnet Infotech and also the head of data at the Navajivan Trust (which was founded by Mahatma Gandhi). With a deep background in both technology and publishing, he understands the challenges involved and is dedicated to helping make it easier for designers to switch to InDesign and Unicode fonts.

A Graphical Gandhi

The Navajivan Trust publishes the works of Gandhi as well as other books and publications that support religious, social, and economic self-reliance and peace. Ashar has helped Navajivan create many documents, including a graphic novel called The Story of Gandhi, as well as The Gita According to Gandhi, and Gandhi’s autobiography (Figure 2). Most of these publications either contain multiple languages or are published separately in various languages. The Story of My Experiments with Truth, for example, is published in Telugu, Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, and several other languages, each with their own script.

Figure 2. Navajivan Trust publications

Ashar also helps Navajivan create a wide variety of other designed pieces, including items for their museum (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Cafe Daily Menu and invitation card

After attending CreativePro Week 2018 in New Orleans, Ashar returned home inspired to attempt something new with InDesign: an interactive audio and video guide for the Hutheesing Jain Temple in Ahmedabad (Figure 4).

Figure 4. Interactive museum app

This multilingual guide was created entirely using InDesign’s interactive features, including multi-state objects, buttons, and embedded audio. He exported the document as HTML5 using the in5 plug-in from Ajar Productions, and visitors to the museum can read and listen on both kiosks and Android mobile devices with headphones.

Book Covers

I reached out to dozens of designers around the world who create Indic fonts or who use InDesign to create Indic-language designs and publications. For example, Anil Ahuja has shifted between the worlds of publication design and software design for 25 years. As a creative director, he has worked at India Today and Outlook Publishing, and is now a senior advisor on design for the United Nations. But he has also been a product manager at both Quark and Adobe, acting as an InDesign product manager from 2010 to 2015. So Ahuja, more than most people, understands the important role InDesign can play in design (see his article on Indic fonts here). Recently, he has become well known for his award-­winning book covers (Figure 5).

Figure 5. Anil Ahuja book covers

A Subcontinent of Design

Let’s take a look at a few other designers in India. Vikkyz In is a designer in Chennai who created a beautiful Tamil wedding invitation in InDesign (Figure 6).

Figure 6. Vikkyz In wedding invitations

He wrote, “It is a custom to follow several aspects in a wedding invitation from the design perspective: like some spiritual image on the cover, bright colors, and design patterns. We generally use gold color in invitations to give a rich look. InDesign helps a lot to make it easier to get a print-ready file.”

Shital Verma is the National Design Editor at a newspaper called Navbharat Times, based in Ghaziabad (near New Delhi), as well as an accomplished illustrator. Like newspaper designers around the world, Verma strives to create a balance among eye-catching headlines, compelling graphics, and the need to pack a large amount of material into a small space (Figure 7).

Figure 7. Shital Verma newspaper designs

While Akshay Chaturvedi works primarily in UI/UX at Exzeo in Noida (just outside New Delhi), he uses InDesign for a wide variety of design projects, including creating wireframes and prototypes for mobile and web layouts. He became an Adobe Certified Expert in InDesign CC in 2015, and has created a number of infographics with it in English, Hindi, Gujrati, and Marathi (Figure 8).

Figure 8. Akshay Chaturvedi infographics

He points to a number of InDesign features that are helpful when designing web and mobile UI layout, including:

• Styles (“of course the best part while designing web and mobile UI layouts”)
• The Data Merge feature
• Hyperlinks and cross-references provide “a useful way of creating interactive PDFs of prototypes for websites and mobile apps for my clients.”
• The Content Collector saves time by letting him “convert a wireframe of my layouts into rich graphic content prototypes.”
• Publish Online “allows me to quickly share my work in progress with my team members.”

InDesign InDic in InDia

Every year there are more high-quality Unicode fonts created for Indic scripts, such as Adobe Devanagari and Yantramanav, Myriad Bengali and Adobe Bengali, Adobe Tamil, and Adobe Gujarati. More importantly, InDesign itself is increasingly able to handle complex letterforms. (For example, InDesign 2020 now includes the Harfbuzz technology to manage scripts such as Khmer and Lao.)

These fonts and technologies will further enable designers to express themselves and build rich print and interactive documents to share with the world. I look forward to seeing more cool designs created in InDesign in all languages. If you’re a designer working in InDesign with Indic fonts, let us know!

Madhurika Modani is also a student in India. She explains that this “was a classroom project. The content that has been used in this project is from an Indian magazine, Meri Saheli, targeted to moms and homemakers in India.”

Sabhyata Jain is a student of graphic design at National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, currently studying in her final year. She writes: “Roopankan is an annual Hindi publication by National Institute of Design. The 2017 edition was an ode to the life and contributions made by Prof. Kumar Vyas. Born in 1929, Vyas was one of the pioneers who headed the industrial design department and helped formulate NID’s curriculum.”

Danielle McLelland is a designer in New York. As a student of the Hindi language, she develops, writes, and designs learning materials for the Hindi language and Devanagari script.

Pallavi Mishra is a designer based in Pune, India. She writes: “This project was my diploma project in post grad. It is about documenting the oral history about a place of historic or cultural significance. The intention was to create an illustrated documentation of popular oral narratives of the town of Orchha—a small, quiet town in the state of Madhya Pradesh, 15 km from Jhansi and about 460 km from New Delhi—looking through the point of view of the locals along with some personal experiences.”

Richa Mourya is a UI/UX designer in Bangalore, but writes that she “designed these newspaper sheets while doing my first internship … at [the] Dainik Bhaskar newspaper, Jharkhand in … 2013. Dainik Bhaskar Group is India’s largest newspaper group with a readership of 1.96 crore.” (In the Indian number system, one lakh equals 100,000, and one crore equals 100 lakh, or ten million.)

Namma Superstars is a magazine about the Kannada cinema industry, published by Aimen Media. Designed by Arun Kumar in Bangalore (in Southern India).