A major problem in the tourism industry is the language barrier, especially those language that uses a different alphabet than the abc. Tourists are unable to read signs and quickly feel disorientated. So Incredible India (India's governmental marketing campaign) launched The Hinglish Project to "make Hindi less intimidating". A typeface was designed which show the phonetic sound of a Hindi character by layering an English character on the Hindi character.
Anindita Ghose, she has a M.A. in Linguistics!- says that despite the differences between Hindi and English, they both originate from "the same phonetic pool, the Endo-European group of languages". This font highlight these commonalities. Talk about design insights! Anindita says "Although this font does not help you to read words exactly as they are spelt in Hindi, it does demistify individual letters"
Incredible iIndia has made a reference flip book, to help tourists identify Hindi lettering quickly. How sweet is that! It's typedesign that familiarize a native language."It's fun, it's pretty and it's a little bit of Hindi" as one tourist puts it.
You can download the entire typeface for free from http://thehinglishproject.com/.
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