On March 23, readers in Hyderabad woke up to a new newspaper in the Telugu language and now more than 1.2 million of them follow the news in a colorful broadsheet that emphasizes local news (15 different local editions produced daily, to accommodate a vast geographic area. Hyderabad is ranked the second largest city in India, in terms of area), national and international news, entertainment, sports, and classified.
Hyderabad is the capital city of the Indian state of Andhra Prades with an estimated metropolitan population of 6.7 million Hyderabad is known for its rich history, culture and architecture, a meeting point of sorts between north and south India. It is multi ethnic, and multi language: Hindi, English and Telugu constitute the three main languages.
“It was very exciting for us at Garcia Media to be selected for the creation of the design of this new newspaper. The challenge was to work with the Telugu alphabet, and, we, of course, relied on local expertise, including a typographer with native knowledge of Telugu,” said Mario Garcia Sr., who was chief architect of the project, working closely with art director Jan Kny, of Garcia Media Europe, as well as the team of Shiva Kumar, of Apparatus Design in Bangalore, India. “Shiva’s team worked very closely with us, and we were extremely proud of our collaboration with the very talented team from Apoparatus.”
Part of the challenge was to work with the Telugu alphabet. Telugu dates back to the 4th century BCE (pre-Mauryan time), and it consists of sixty symbols.
“For us in the design team, the real challenge was to deal with space between lines of text and headlines, since many of the Telugu characters have descendents that determine the meaning of a certain word,” Garcia said. “We made adjustments in the interline spacing to accommodate this.”
As a new newspaper, we designed it to be part of a good print/online fusion. Mario Garcia Jr. worked with Shiva’s team as well on the creation of the website, http://www.sakshi.com.
“When we wanted to design a revolutionary Telugu newspaper for the State of Andhra Pradesh in India our choice was clear – Garcia Media,” said Jaganmohan Reddy, publisher of Sakshi. “In this engagement Mario Garcia and his team have clearly delivered a winner. To create this new brand, they understood the ground reality and the cultural nuances before they created a well structured framework with a wide color palette. They devised the design for print and further extended it to the Internet. Further they helped hire and hone the senior design team. We have launched the newspaper in the March of 2008 and the key differentiator in Sakshi is the structure and the design. This has already given us an edge over the competition.”