Back in 2007, while in college in the UK, as a student of graphic design, I used to get a lot of questions from my friends asking why is (mostly all) literature and design in India in English and very few in Hindi. It took me a year to answer this question, and it’s stated nowhere but on the Indian currency note that we have 22 registered national languages. That was the answer to why we don’t have more logos, advertising, or even digital media in regional languages.
As their question had me very curious for quite a long time, I started looking for more information about regional branding across the world. In that course, I came to know from a friend who lived in Beijing that they had coke cans in Mandarin and I actually asked him to get me one when he came back. That got me started working on Coca-Cola’s Hindi logo, thinking I would sell it to the corporate house. But coke never needed one in India as they were happy with the popular English version – their iconic word mark and red colour – also for a larger audience in rural India, they got a lot of hand painters to paint big walls across highways and villages. To see that, I only realized that I had digitised the logo, it already existed.
Cut to 2024, today the country is going through a nationalist phase and a lot of political parties are asking businesses to have a logo in the regional language. Just recently we designed a brand identity for a luxury real estate company based in Mumbai, and just as we had finished the project, we got a request for the word mark to be in Hindi as a special requirement. Now in most cases, people here do not care about the wordmark or identity to have the same characters as the logo and usually go with a daily/regular use of Devnagari script to portray the logo and this brought me back to my college days and why we should have a regional language identity.
It is important for brands to realize that if you want to go that extra mile and connect with a larger audience even though they might not be their target audience, the brand should have a sense of language and identity to have their logo and visual representation to be in their brand language even though it does not exist, they need to go ahead and create that identity. It only goes to show that you care for your products’ presence and perseverance for your brand. It is also the responsibility of the design fraternity to educate our clients and go the extra mile to create that word mark and identity in the regional script. Also since my college days (2007), the Devnagari script has evolved and a lot of people in the design community are having their moment, be it Kimya Gandhi with her beautiful type expression and typefaces in Devnagari or be it ITF (Indian Type Foundry) with extensive typefaces in many regional languages for India, there is a lot of options out there and a lot more awareness and why should we not ride that wave. Do you have an identity and want a regional interpretation of the same? We are ready for it.
